Mimusubi

The 3rd May issue of Jinja Shinpō had a very interesting article about Kashima Jingū, an ancient jinja in Ibaraki Prefecture. The jinja claims to be well over 2500 years old, which is probably not true, but there are archaeological discoveries from the fifth century, so it is certainly over 1500 years old. The article was about part of the jinja’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is currently holding proxy matsuri on the first day of every month, for the benefit of people who cannot currently travel to the… Read More »Veneration by Proxy

I’ve been asked to give some recommendations for books to read in Japanese about Shinto, because some of the people following my blog can read Japanese. If you can’t, this post is not going to be of much use to you — sorry. My first recommendation is the official texts for the Jinja Kentei. At least some of these are available from Amazon US (and I have added affiliate links), which is one reason to recommend them. However, Amazon Japan will also ship overseas, so I have added (affiliate) links… Read More »Jinja Kentei Textbooks 1

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