Mimusubi

A couple of weeks ago, one of my patrons asked me if there were kami outside Japan. The answer is not entirely straightforward, so it gets a blog post. First, there are two related questions that do have entirely straightforward answers. Non-Japanese people may venerate the Japanese kami within Shinto (Jinja Honchō is taking active steps to encourage that among visitors to Japan), and the Japanese kami may be venerated outside Japan (Imperial Japan founded a number of overseas jinja for that purpose, as did Japanese emigrants in the late… Read More »Kami Outside Japan

Yasukuni Jinja, in Tokyo, enshrines the spirits of everyone who died fighting for the Tennō between, roughly, 1854 and 1945. (The main reason that there are no later enshrinements is that no-one has died fighting for the Tennō since then.) It is, as you are almost certainly aware, extremely controversial, because of its association with Japanese imperialism. The previous Tennō never visited the jinja as Tennō, and I am not sure whether the current Tennō has ever visited it at all. At any rate, he has not visited since becoming… Read More »Imperial Envoy to Yasukuni

A couple of weeks ago I was preparing something for Jinja Honchō, and needed to check Kokugakuin’s English Shinto website. That reminded me that I hadn’t written about it here, so I am making up for that now. Kokugakuin University is the larger of the two Shinto universities in Japan, and trains more Shinto priests than any other institution. It does a lot of research on Shinto, and publishes some of that research in English. It also has a museum, which has a section on Shinto that is worth a… Read More »Kokugakuin’s English Site

The Kumamoto Earthquakes were just over five years ago. About six months ago, I wrote an essay about their impact and the recovery, but the April 26th issue of Jinja Shinpō had a long article on the current situation, including a particularly interesting situation at one jinja, so I would like to bring things up to date. The big picture is that the recovery is progressing well. A lot of rebuilding has happened, and some of the major damage to infrastructure has been repaired. For example, a major bridge that… Read More »Rebuilding in Kumamoto

April’s Patreon essay was about the archaeology of Shinto, and it is now available for purchase on Gumroad. Although the earliest written records of Shinto date from the eighth century, they describe an existing practice. Archaeology provides the only evidence we have on just how much further back it goes — and it seems that we have good evidence as far back as the fourth century.