2020

I have made two more of the back numbers of the Patreon essays available on Amazon: Shinto Practice for Non-Japanese. (Note that the links to Amazon are affiliate links, which means that I may get money if you buy something else after clicking on them, as well as, obviously, getting royalties if you buy my book.) This includes the essay for last month. I’ve made it available this quickly because these essays address questions that get asked a lot: can someone who isn’t Japanese practise Shinto, and if so, what… Read More »Shinto Practice for Non-Japanese

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an article published in Jinja Shinpō that was indirectly critical of the Shinto establishment, and wondered whether there would be any follow-up. There was. A couple of weeks ago, Jinja Shinpō carried two articles that were explicitly responding to that one. One of them was from a retired priest in his eighties, who lives in Yamaguchi Prefecture in western Japan. His main argument was that Shinto priests today weren’t as good as they were in the old days. There has, he claims, been… Read More »Further Dissension

As regular readers of this blog will know, Jinja Shinpō has recently carried a lot of articles about jinja that have adapted their matsuri to COVID-19, with details about how they have done it. A couple of weeks ago, they published one that struck me as a particularly practical and interesting idea. The jinja in question, Nishinë Jinja in Fukushima City, seems to be fairly large (although I had never heard of it before — with 80,000 jinja in Japan, I suspect that I will continue hearing about new ones… Read More »Umbrellas for All

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