February 2021

Jinja Honchō runs an annual conference for priests, at which academics give presentations on topics relevant to the religious content of Shinto. Normally, the priests gather for this, but that was not possible last year. Instead, two presentations were recorded, and made available on the priests-only website. I haven’t seen them, because I’m not a priest, but quite a lot of priests apparently did. They may even have been accessible to more priests than usual, as there was no need to travel to a central site, but there was no… Read More »Epidemics and Matsuri

I have just made two more of the Patreon essays available for purchase on Amazon. These essays, Myths of Jinmu Tennō, cover most of the myths about Jinmu Tennō, the first Tennō, from when he left Hyūga in southeastern Kyushu to the completion of his conquest of Yamato in central Japan. There are a few more myths about the establishment of his rule, and I will write another essay about those in the near future. The scholarly consensus is that Jinmu Tennō did not exist, and that there was no… Read More »Myths of Jinmu Tennō

The 25th January issue of Jinja Shinpō carried an article about the enshrinement of kami in a new jinja. This jinja is called “Transport Jinja” (交通神社), and it is on the roof of a shopping mall attached to JR Miyazaki Station, in southeastern Kyushu. It is sponsored by three transport companies and the company that built the mall, which is closely linked to JR Kyushu (one of the three transport companies). The companies spoke to the priests at Miyazaki Jingū about the project, and the jinja agreed to enshrine a… Read More »“Transport Jinja”