Jinja Honchō’s English Website

Jinja Honchō has just renewed its English website. I was one of the main people working on this, so I want to write a bit about the process. You can see the website for yourself.

Work on the new website started over a year ago; my earliest file is from February last year. The plan was for a complete redesign of the English site. Visually, the Japanese site was also being redone, and the goal was to have them look very similar (as they now do). My contribution to the visual design was minor — suggestions for some of the photographs, and a handful of comments on small layout glitches. However, the project also included a complete revision of the content to make it more useful and accessible to non-Japanese.

There were three of us who were really working on it: me, the other native English speaking consultant at Jinja Honchō, and one of the members of the International Section who has pretty good English. The section head was officially involved, but he doesn’t speak English much at all, so he mainly just nodded and approved what we said. Occasionally, he made judgement calls (after translation into Japanese) when we were not sure how best to express the ideas — or whether something was likely to be acceptable.

Acceptability was a central consideration. This is Jinga Honchō’s website, even if it is in English, and so Jinja Honchō has to support every statement on it. That meant writing the text in English, discussing it with my colleagues, revising the text, translating it into Japanese (that was done by my colleague in the section), checking the Japanese translation, and then sending the Japanese translation around Jinja Honchō to make sure that everyone was on board with it.

It is important to do things this way round, and to not translate the Japanese website. I have mentioned this before, but Japanese text is aimed at Japanese, who have very different background knowledge, and are likely to want answers to different questions. This does mean that we need to make Japanese translations for internal use, which is more effort than working off approved texts in Japanese, but I think it is worth it.

Worth it or not, this process took time, and that is part of the reason why quite a bit of the material is revised from the pamphlets listed on the front page — those texts had already been approved, so we could cut bits out and use them without any problems. This means that there are three main authors for the site: me, the other native speaker, and the author(s) of Soul of Japan. The two of us who were working on this project both checked everything, and both suggested revisions that were made, but you might well spot differences in style between sections. You might also be able to tell which parts were basically by me. (For the pamphlets, Jinja and Shinto Myths are by me, and Matsuri is by the other guy. This will help with some bits…) I think this diversity is a good thing — Jinja Honchō’s website should reflect several slightly different perspectives, because Jinja Honchō is not entirely unified.

Overall, I am happy with the result. I didn’t get everything I wanted, mainly because Jinja Honchō cannot say certain sorts of thing. For example, I wanted suggestions about jinja to visit, or links to good English-language jinja web pages, but Jinja Honchō is not allowed to mention any individual jinja, other than Isë Jingū. (Hence Shinto in Person: Tokyo, and the currently-hypothetical other books in that series.) I also wanted to give some detail about setting up a kamidana, but that took us into controversial areas, so we could go no further than the statement “Non-Japanese are welcome to venerate the kami in the same way if they so wish”. (That was a couple of paragraphs in the first version.) I did manage to get a clear statement about practising Shinto (which I wrote) into the FAQ and onto the front page.

I think the pages are now a good introduction to Shinto for people who know nothing. They are also a good resource if you get involved in arguments about Shinto. Any statement on this site was approved by Jinja Honchō. That means that they support it, and they think that all mainstream Shinto priests will accept it. And that was my primary goal: create a good source of solid basic information about Shinto from a clearly reliable source.

I hope people do find it useful.