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Led by Sacred Dance

The August 3rd issue of Jinja Shinpō also included the first article by another Komorebi author. Revd Yokota is a sacred dance instructor for Hiroshima Prefectural Jinjachō, and a junior priest at Yoshiura Hachiman Jinja (吉浦八幡神社). Her articles in this series will focus on her half-century and more of experience of sacred dance, and so the first one, naturally enough, is about how she got started. She was born into a priestly family (second daughter, third child). She was part of the family’s preparation for matsuri from a very early… Read More »Led by Sacred Dance

Caring for Sacred Forests

The August 3rd issue of Jinja Shinpō included a double-page spread of articles about sacred forests. One article was about the sacred forests at Jingū, but since I wrote about them two weeks ago, I will skip over that one here. The other articles were about caring for sacred forests. One was by an expert on urban trees, talking about the issues specific to them. As he points out, trees die. They live a lot longer than people, but they do die, and then fall over. Before they reach that… Read More »Caring for Sacred Forests

Sacred Waters

The August 3rd issue of Jinja Shinpō was the special summer issue, which has twice as many pages as usual. Much of the space is taken up by the names of jinja, because they pay to have their name appear in this issue (and the New Year issue). Another distinctive feature of this issue is that the front and back pages are printed in colour, and taken up with what could be called a photo essay. The theme this time was sacred waters. The front page was a picture of… Read More »Sacred Waters

Diversity

There were a couple of interesting articles in the July 27th issue of Jinja Shinpō, into which I may be reading too much. The first was the “Thoughts in the Forest” column, which was one of the pseudonymous entries. The author — whose written name might not even have a reading given that it is a pseudonym, so I will just read the first two characters as “Ueto” — apparently has non-standard colour vision. He (probably, looking at the pseudonym, and the strong hints that he has the red/green variation… Read More »Diversity

Forests at Jingū

The new set of authors for the Komorebi column in Jinja Shinpō are publishing their first instalments, and the July 27th issue included the first column by Yamamoto Yoshiya, who works in the forestry department at Isë Jingū. He promises to write about the forests, and so I anticipate reporting on his columns quite often. His first column is introductory. The forests around Jingū are divided into two parts — the Shin’iki (神域), “area of the kami”, and Kyūikirin (宮域林), “sanctuary area woodland”. The Shin’iki is the area immediately around… Read More »Forests at Jingū

Imperial Succession

I have written about the Imperial family and succession on this blog before, but the relevant law was revised on July 17th, and there was a front-page article about it in the July 27th issue of Jinja Shinpō, so I am going to write about it again. The Tennō is extremely important to mainstream Shinto, and to Japanese conservatives in general. The immediate reason for this is that the Meiji government, which had just overthrown the Tokugawa government, used jinja and priests as part of a propaganda effort to make… Read More »Imperial Succession