gender

Revd Tagawa’s series of columns in Jinja Shinpō continued in the December 16th issue. This instalment covers the beginning of her service as a priest. As she mentioned in the previous column, she had found a place at Imari Jinja, fairly near her home, and she was soon given responsibility for gokitō (formal prayers). This was not just in the jinja itself, but also in their wedding hall. There, she had a problem. The miko were older than her, and their reaction was to laugh. “What? A female priest?” Now,… Read More »Starting to Serve

Revd Tagawa, the chief priest of Fukumo Hachimangū in Saga Prefecture, had the second of her columns in the September 23rd issue of Jinja Shinpō. In her first column she talked about why she decided to become a priest, and this column was about a similarly important decision that she made near the end of her university career. She was studying at Kokugakuin University, and she says that, even though she was technically from a priestly family, because she had been raised in an ordinary household — rather than at… Read More »Graduation Decisions

Hikari no Mai is a new sacred dance. Half of the back page of the March 18th issue (yes, this post got significantly delayed) of Jinja Shinpō  was devoted to an article about it, and the article was unsigned, which means that it was produced by core staff. The dance was created at the initiative of the Fukushima Prefecture Young Priests’ Association, which first proposed it in 2016. The idea was to create a dance that could both commemorate people who had died in natural disasters, and pray for the… Read More »Hikari no Mai

This year, the Community of Sant’Egidio held its meeting for peace in Berlin. Last year, when it was in Rome, I was part of the Jinja Honchō delegation, but this year the decision was that I wouldn’t go. I am told that things went well enough, so we will see what happens next year. If they suddenly decide that I should go again, that would suggest there was room for improvement… Anyway, three people went in the end: the director of our department (Revd Ushio), the head of our section… Read More »Berlin Meeting

“Hikari no Mai” (“Dance of Light”) is a particular kagura, or sacred dance. I think a lot of people have an image of kagura as being ancient, but this is not generally the case. Urayasu no Mai, possibly the most common kagura in contemporary Shinto, was created in 1940, and Toyosaka no Mai and Asahi no Mai, the other candidates for the most common contemporary kagura, in 1950. Hikari no Mai is even more recent. It was commissioned by the Shinto Young Priests’ Association to mark their 70th anniversary, and… Read More »Hikari no Mai

The 31st July issue of Jinja Shinpō contained a long article on a study meeting of the national association of female priests, the first one held in person since before the pandemic. The main speaker was Dana Mirsalis, an assistant professor at Pacific University who studies female priests in contemporary Shinto. Her talk covered three topics — menstruation and blood kegarë, external matsuri, and physical labour — and was followed by a discussion session in which the attendees picked up on those questions. On menstruation, Prof. Mirsalis observed that the… Read More »Studying Female Priests