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digital world

Cashless Payments Revisited

The 17th February issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article reporting on the latest meeting of Jinja Honchō’s committee to consider contemporary issues, which basically means the questions of how jinja should deal with the online world, and what they should do about cashless payments. As I have mentioned before, since the pandemic Japan has become less and less of a cash-based society, and foreign tourists often do not have Japanese cash at all. This raises an issue for jinja, because they are not set up to take cashless payments,… Read More »Cashless Payments Revisited

Remote Offerings

The 8th July issue of Jinja Shinpō had an interesting historical article about the ways people made offerings to Jingū in the early sixteenth century. It was written by the head of Nagasaki Prefectural Jinjachō, based on surviving documents from what is now Okayama Prefecture. These record 479 people who visited Jingū with a particular onshi (the priests who gathered adherents for Jingū and organised their visits), and give details of how they made their offerings. It seems that only 82 of them took cash to Isë and made their… Read More »Remote Offerings

Digital Okayama 2.0

A few months ago, I wrote about an article describing the digital transition of the Okayama Prefectural Jinjachō, and mentioned that they were planning to move to online applications for many things. An article in the May 13th issue of Jinja Shinpō reported on what happened when they did. The online application system was made available on April 1st, and can handle eight kinds of standard application. These are the ones that are handled entirely within the Jinjachō, and so they do not need to receive a paper form with… Read More »Digital Okayama 2.0

Coins and Cards

A couple of issues that I have mentioned previously also came up in the free responses to the hatsumōdë survey, both connected to practical issues around offerings. The first is the service charge for depositing coins. Most jinja seem to have failed to find a way around that. Some are simply giving one yen coins (which cost more than one yen to deposit in a bank account) to UNICEF, while others have managed to make arrangements with local shops that cope most of the year, but cannot handle the vast… Read More »Coins and Cards

Crowdfunding Trees

I have mentioned the use of crowdfunding in the Shinto community before, and in this post I am going to introduce one that is currently active. This is organised by Daini no Furusato Sōsei Kyōkai (Second Hometown Creation Group, although the official English translation is apparently “The Japanese Festival and Forest Association”), an organisation I have done quite a bit with — they organise the volunteers for Natsumoude at Asakusa Jinja, which I have done several times. This crowdfunding is for replanting the sacred forest at a jinja in Iwatë… Read More »Crowdfunding Trees

Digital Okayama

The February 5th issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article by a senior staff member of Okayama Prefectural Jinjachō, about their digital transition. This transition seems to have been driven by the head of the Jinjachō, which is probably how the first examples had to happen. There seem to be two main elements to this transition. First, they have stopped requiring inkan stamps (the name stamps that used to be needed on everything back when I first came to Japan, eeee, those were the good old days, where’re my glasses,… Read More »Digital Okayama