work for jinja honcho

At the beginning of October, I went to Kazakhstan with one of my colleagues from Jinja Honchō, Revd Mitsui, to attend the XXII Meeting of the Secretariat of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, and the first meeting of the Forum of Young Religious Leaders. Strictly speaking, Revd Mitsui was attending the meetings, and I was there to interpret for him. This is the third time we have attended these meetings. The first time, I had to provide interpretation. The second time, last year, there were interpreters.… Read More »Secretariat in Kazakhstan 2024

One of the jobs I did through Jinja Honchō last year was assisting with the translation of a full set of omikuji, for Joshidōsha (Girls’ Way Company). The company itself has a very interesting history, as it was set up in the Meiji period to support girls’ education by a priest who campaigned for women to be allowed to become priests, and sold paper omikuji to jinja to fund those activities. However, in this post I am writing about the omikuji. Omikuji are often called “fortunes”, although these are called… Read More »Bilingual Omikuji

This post is a bit less about Shinto and a bit more about what I do for Jinja Honchō and more generally for the Shinto community. As readers probably know, most of what I do is the preparation of English material to introduce Shinto to a foreign audience. (I occasionally work as an interpreter for people at Jinja Honchō, but that is minor in terms of time spent — although it pays well.) Since the beginning, I have been emphasising that simply translating the Japanese material for a Japanese audience… Read More »Translation

The February 19th issue of Jinja Shinpō devoted most of the front and back pages to events celebrating National Foundation Day, February 11th. This is the solar calendar date of the mythical accession of Jinmu Tennō on the first day of lunisolar 660 BC. I have been closely involved in one of the events for several years — the central event to celebrate the day, held at Meiji Jingū by a group that is technically different from Jinja Honchō, but run out of their offices. As I know, after translating… Read More »Word Choice

The February 12th issue of Jinja Shinpō includes an article about Mimusubi. Admittedly, I wrote it, but they have printed it, and so now people in mainstream Shinto who carefully read Jinja Shinpō every week know about this website. It also mentions my tendency to rely on articles in the newspaper for content for the blog, so we can now safely assume that they are happy with that. The article is about my efforts to make Shinto culture more widely known and accessible overseas, and talks about Mimusubi as the… Read More »Mimusubi in Jinja Shinpō