With Jinja Honchō’s new website, they have also made some new pamphlets public. Soul of Japan and Jinja were available before, but the others, I think, are new. Matsuri was mainly by the other consultant, so I am not going to say much about it — although it is worth reading.
I wrote Shinto Myths a couple of years ago (checking my files, actually 2021-2), but I don’t think it made it online before the beginning of this month. The art and layout took quite some time, and as you can see from the back cover it was officially published in November last year, at which point the site revision was in full flow.
This is, conceptually, a very simple booklet, as it just retells the central myths from the Kojiki. It is a really short and accessible introduction to those myths, and I hope a lot of people will read it. This booklet was carefully checked within Jinja Honchō, just like the website, to make sure that the translation was acceptable. That covers both the word choice, and the choice of which myths to include. So, this is, what should we call it, official? approved?. No, I know.
The is the Authorised Version of Shinto myths.
I prepared Irei last year. This is a new version of a booklet that existed in the past, and has an interesting history. This year is the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and that is important for the jinja that enshrine the war dead. Last year, Jinja Honchō got a phone call from Yasukuni Jinja, asking if they had more copies of the previous version of Irei. They didn’t, and so they would need to reprint. With that in mind, they asked me if it needed revisions, and I said that would be a good idea.
Jinja Honchō got back in touch with Yasukuni Jinja (which is not technically affiliated with Jinja Honchō), and the jinja said that the chief priest wanted to be personally involved. There was a lot of back-and-forth, about the wording, revisions to make things more accessible to foreigners, and some reorganisation. The hope is that this pamphlet will help non-Japanese to understand Yasukuni Jinja a bit better, which means that we had to be very careful about phrasing. On the one hand, we want to avoid misunderstandings, but we must not misrepresent the way that Yasukuni Jinja actually sees its own role. And, since Jinja Honchō is actually publishing the pamphlet, they had to approve it as well.
This was a lot of work per word. However, Yasukuni Jinja was, apparently, very happy with the result, and they have taken up several thousand copies to distribute to visitors during this anniversary year. I believe that they have also turned the pamphlet into a display board in the museum (or possibly several — I haven’t been to see, and last I heard they were still considering options). It is also being offered to Gokoku Jinja across the country, so if you visit Japan this year you should be able to get a physical copy — free.
I want to say a bit about working with the chief priest, Revd Ōtsuka, because he was a pleasure to work with. He actually read the drafts, and raised questions about some of the phrasing. When I explained my choices, he sometimes accepted those explanations, and sometimes asked me to make revisions anyway. That is exactly how this sort of interaction should go.
I want to give one example, which you can find on page 11 (section 5). The conservative community in Japan does not talk about the Second World War, because the war in question, for Japan, started in the early 1930s. The standard name is “大東亜戦争” (Daitōasensō), which, by the kanji, is “great” “east” “asia” “war (the last two together)”, and is normally translated in English as the Great East Asian War (are you shocked?). This was one of the points raised early on, because I pointed out that most English speakers would not know which war that was, and we agreed to use Second World War most of the time, but with this one mention of the Japanese name. Which I initially translated as “Great East Asian War”.
Revd Ōtsuka got back to me on that point, asking me to change it. “If you put it that way, people might think that the war was great. It doesn’t mean that — it means that it covers a wider region centred on East Asia. It’s like Greater Tokyo.”
So, we changed the phrasing because the retired admiral who currently serves as the chief priest of Yasukuni Jinja wanted to avoid glorifying war.