Mimusubi

This blog post covers two articles about sacred forests from Jinja Shinpō, because these two drifted a bit from the core topic in talking about the history and etymology of sacred forests. The article in the January 31st issue was mainly about sacred forests in other cultures; they were found in ancient Egypt, and in India, and in China from the fifth or sixth century. It did talk briefly about Japan. There are remains of structures from the mid-Yayoi period onwards (from around 100 BCE) that appear to be ritual… Read More »Origins and Etymology of Sacred Forests

My book, An Introduction to Shinto, is now available in print from Amazon (affiliate link!). It is available from all the local Amazons, although the affiliate link is to the US store, because that is where most of my sales happen. The content is the same as the Kindle version, except that I have added QR Codes for the links, and the paperback is printed in black and white, so the illustrations and photographs are also in black and white. This is not ideal, especially for the illustrations of priestly… Read More »An Introduction to Shinto in Paperback

This is a short post. I have posted about the Encyclopedia of Shinto at Kokugakuin University before, but that was a while ago, and one of my patrons sent me a message revealing that he didn’t know about it. This is a freely-accessible English translation of the standard Japanese Encyclopedia of Shinto. I think it is very reliable; I use the Japanese version when I want to check particular facts, and the translation was done by most of the English-speaking scholars of Shinto who were active at the time. It… Read More »Encyclopedia of Shinto

There was another article about sacred forests in the January 24th issue of Jinja Shinpō, and this one was also by Prof. Watanabë. It is not about sacred forests per se, but rather about the use of plants and trees in Shinto matsuri. This article is a problem to write about, because it refers to all the specific species of plants that are used in matsuri at different jinja and in different regions of Japan, and it does so by their Japanese names. I recognise most of these in Japanese,… Read More »Plants in Matsuri

The video in this post gives an overall impression of the ceremonies around the transfer of the kami from one sanctuary to another at a jinja in rural Kyoto Prefecture. It has proper English subtitles for the explanations (although the English translation is not as great as it could be), so it should be accessible to most of my readers. It’s also short — only three minutes. The making of the video was reported in the January 24th issue of Jinja Shinpō, which is how I found out about it.… Read More »Sengū Video

The January 17th issue of Jinja Shinpō carried the latest article about sacred forests, this one concerning “big trees”. The article is by a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, Watanabë Hiroyuki (probably… there is the usual problem with the reading of the name not being given), and is about large, famous trees and their relationship with jinja. The Japanese government has a formal standard for “kyoboku” or “kyoju” — “big trees” or “giant trees”. This is that the trunk must have a circumference of at least three metres at “chest… Read More »Big Trees