Okuni Jinja (小國神社), which is in Shizuoka Prefecture, has just updated its English website. They have added pages about gokitō and home veneration.
To be specific, they hired me to write the pages, and a local web company to do the layout. Both pages are very detailed, because I was writing with people who know nothing about Shinto practice in mind.
This time, they did not hire me through Jinja Honchō, so this was an independent job. Because I was just working for an individual jinja, I was able to be a lot more definite about a lot of points than I ever can be when writing for Jinja Honchō. Thus, if you are interested in step-by-step details of what a gokitō is like at one jinja, or in the guidance this jinja offers for venerating kamidana, this is the place to look.
It is, however, important to remember that these are the details for Okuni Jinja, and there are quite a lot of differences at other jinja. For example, the “osagari” that you receive after a gokitō are different from place to place, and most jinja do not have you wear a sash.
Another point that may be of interest, somewhat buried in the home veneration page, is that they are willing to send ofuda to people outside Japan. At the moment, you have to email them (the address is under the Contact tab at the bottom of each page) and then sort out making the offering. You can email them in English, and I believe they will use machine translation to make the communication work. However, you should be aware that, at the moment, making the offering is likely to involve an international bank transfer, and the fees for that are probably higher than the offering itself. Still, it is possible, and this is progress.
The jinja is looking into ways to making the process much easier for people overseas — probably something involving credit cards — but I get the impression that this has proved trickier than anticipated. They do still intend to do it, but the practical issues are still under investigation.
Okuni Jinja, or at least the senior priests, are very keen on making the jinja as open as possible to people from different cultures. (I should note that this is not true of every jinja. On the other hand, the chief priest of Okuni Jinja is the current head of the “ultra-conservative, far-right” Shintō Political League. We are not talking about somewhere on the liberal fringe of Shinto…) This is why the section on appropriate dress explicitly says that formal wear from any culture is acceptable, and that “smart casual” is fine if you are visiting from overseas. (Do you take a suit on holiday? I often do, actually, but that’s because I’m often planning to visit a jinja…) There are a lot of southeast Asian immigrants in the area around the jinja, and the priests are keen for them to feel welcome to visit, even if they do not feel they can pay their respects. Not all of them have a problem doing so — some have Shichigosan done for their children.
I wrote about Okuni Jinja as part of the Shinto in Person: Shizuoka series, and I will now need to revise that essay for the book, as I had hoped. Okuni Jinja is my recommendation if you want to have a gokitō done while visiting the jinja on that tour, because they are positively enthusiastic about foreigners doing so.