September 2020

A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting little article in Jinja Shinpō about a jinja that has been involved in the creation of a local craft beer. The jinja is Haijima Tenjinja, and it is in Akishima City, which is part of Tokyo Metropolitan Prefecture, right on the edge of the urban area in the west. (Tokyo Metropolitan Prefecture has a rural bit in the Tama region, to the northwest of the main urban area. Akishima is pretty much on the boundary between urban and rural.) Haijima Tenjinja… Read More »Local Beer

Two prefectural Jinjachō, Saitama and Osaka, have worked together, with support from Jinja Honchō and in consultation with an expert on infection prevention, to create a set of guidelines for jinja to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 while continuing their activities. This is described as “A New Form of Jinja Reverence”, and their slogan is “For Unchanged Prayers”. They have a logo for this, as well. The guidelines themselves are very practical, and largely what you would expect. For example, they recommend taking steps to maintain distance between people,… Read More »Guidelines for Jinja

The Nihon Ryōiki is a collection of myths written around 800 by a Buddhist monk called Kyōkai. It is not often mentioned in the context of Shinto, despite its age, because it is normally described as a collection of Buddhist “setsuwa”, or exemplary tales. And, “obviously”, if it is a collection of Buddhist stories, it can’t be of any relevance to Shinto. As I oh-so-subtly indicated by my use of scare quotes, I do not entirely agree. I have just read a selection of stories from it as part of… Read More »Nihon Ryōiki

All jinja that are affiliated with Jinja Honchō have to pay annual dues. I am not sure how much they are, but they are significant, because Jinja Honchō has an annual budget of around ¥5 billion, which would make the average contribution per jinja about ¥60,000, or $600. Bear in mind that this includes tiny jinja out in rural areas with no income. The average contribution per priest is about ¥250,000, or about $2,500. When jinja are struck by a crisis, the dues to Jinja Honchō have the potential to… Read More »Paying Dues

One of the major social problems facing Japan at the moment is the depopulation of rural areas. In fact, the underlying problem is the depopulation of anywhere that isn’t greater Tokyo, but it is not yet a crisis for regional cities. In rural areas, however, there are villages where the average age is over seventy, and the youngest people are in their fifties. The general consensus is that almost all of those communities will vanish in the next couple of decades. This creates a particular problem for the Shinto world,… Read More »Jinja and Depopulation

Quite a bit of the work I do for Jinja Honchō is internal translations, and the most recent pamphlet I developed for them wasn’t put online, so I haven’t been able to introduce any of my work in detail for quite a while. However, I now have a chance. Jinja Honchō has prepared a set of pictograms for jinja to use to provide guidance to visitors about the jinja’s COVID-19 precautions. You can download them from the Jinja Honchō website. As well as PDF and PNG versions, you can download… Read More »Practical Pictograms