2021

The autumn meeting of the Jinja Honchō Oversight Council happened on October 20th, and was reported in the November 1st issue of Jinja Shinpō. It was not quite as dramatic as I had feared it could be: no-one resigned, no-one was fired, and there were no actual fistfights (at least according to the published report). However, it was quite dramatic enough. All the ordinary business was conducted, and all of that seems to have been passed without any trouble. The controversial issue was the ongoing court case, and so that… Read More »Oversight Council Meeting

The 1st November issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article about the completion of repairs on a jinja that was damaged in an earthquake. This in itself is not unusual, and the jinja is in Fukushima Prefecture, which had a lot of jinja damaged in the Great East Japan Earthquake. This particular jinja, however, was damaged in an earthquake that happened in February this year, and the repairs were completed in time for the Autumn Grand Festival in mid-September. The article starts off in the same way as most such… Read More »Reconstruction Practicalities

I wrote before about Amabië, a yōkai who became very popular as a ward against COVID-19 (and, given the low infection and death rates in Japan, maybe it worked…). There was an interesting article in the November 1st Jinja Shinpō about Amabië in space. Literally. A company in Tokyo that organises access to space for small groups or companies that want to do experiments is sending a package up to the International Space Station. Part of this package is a small (6 cm by 3 cm) aluminium panel with a… Read More »Amabië in Spaaaaace!

As I have mentioned before, it is unusual for images of kami to be the objects of devotion in Shinto. Most jinja do not have images of the kami on display, and although the goshintai are sometimes statues of the kami, that is not the most common situation. There are, of course, exceptions, such as images of Daikoku and Ebisu, or a local practice in Miyagi Prefecture that I have seen mentioned a few times but know little about. The October 25th issue of Jinja Shinpō had an article about… Read More »Kami Images

The October 25th issue of Jinja Shinpō included another column by Revd Mori, the female priest whose columns I have talked about several times in the past. This time, she wrote about how she nearly quit being a priest — or, more accurately, about how she did briefly quit. After finishing her training and her period working at the Imperial Palace, she went to work at a jinja (which she does not name). By the time she reached her seventh year there, however, she felt that she could not continue… Read More »A Priest’s Calling

I am currently preparing for a future Patreon essay (or maybe two or three) on how the Great East Japan Earthquake on 11 March 2011 affected jinja in the region, and what has been done to help with the recovery.  I have mentioned some aspects of this on this blog, but it is sufficiently important to Shinto and contemporary Japan to merit essays of its own. (It is worth remembering that, for Japan, the earthquake and tsunami killed about as many people in twelve hours (18,425, if you total the… Read More »Earthquake Scale