work for jinja honcho

I have mentioned before on this blog that I wrote a booklet for Jinja Honchō entitled “Jinja: Heart of Japan” to serve as their general introduction to Shinto for foreigners. Most of the content was incorporated into Jinja Honchō’s English language website, and has been available for a while, but the only way to see the full booklet was to get hold of a physical copy. That has changed. The PDF is now available on their website. As you can see, there are nine languages available. The choice of languages… Read More »Jinja: Heart of Japan in PDF

Jinja Honchō has recently published three new videos on the etiquette for visiting a jinja. They aren’t really three videos, though, because the two short ones are just extracts from the full-length one. I will link to the full one first; it’s about four minutes long. As you can see, it not only has English on-screen captions, but it has an English narration. I did the English adaptation, but Jinja Honchō hired a professional to do the voice-over. She was really good; we had to do one retake because she… Read More »Visiting a Shinto Jinja: Attitude and Etiquette

Sugō Jinja is in Okazaki, in Aichi Prefecture, and is in the grounds of the castle where Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, was born. Its chief priest contacted Jinja Honchō about preparing an English leaflet, and we recently finished the job; the leaflet should have been printed by now. This task was a good illustration of the difficulties with these kinds of translations. First, the original Japanese history of the jinja was based on texts that were decades old, at least, and hard even for most contemporary… Read More »Sugō Jinja

Jinja Honchō has put the English version of the next video in the “Tales of Sacred Forests” series online. This is the last one I have done, so there won’t be any more for a while now. My understanding is that the series will continue, but I don’t know the details, and those are the sorts of plans that change. This is an interesting jinja. As you can see, it is very small, it is built on an ancient tomb, and the identity of the enshrined kami is not entirely… Read More »“Tales of Sacred Forests”: Shōri Daimyōjin

I have recently completed some more translation for another jinja as part of my work for Jinja Honchō. This one was a rush job, because the jinja had received a grant from the local government to renovate their toilets, and one condition was that they provide informational signs in four foreign languages: English, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. They were getting a bit close to the deadline. This is interesting for two reasons. First, the local government gave a religious corporation a grant to do something. I am guessing… Read More »Government Grants