David Chart

The Ieshima islands are a group of islands in the Seto Inland Sea, southwest of Himeji. The main island, also called Ieshima, has a jinja, called Ieshima Jinja, and towards the end of last month, the jinja held its main annual matsuri. Most years, this involves decorated boats, and appears to be something of a tourist attraction, but this year, of course, things had to be toned down and reduced in scale. The decorated boats were cancelled, as were other events, and the matsuri was limited to the shinji ceremonies… Read More »Out to Sea

While I was researching another piece, I came across the following group: https://theshow.jp The website is all in Japanese at the moment, but you can see the pictures. They offer a Japanese-style dinner show, with Japanese food, and a Japanese story to the play. The play starts with Taira no Masakado, a hero from around Tokyo in the tenth century who defended local people, but was declared an enemy of the Tennō and killed by an army sent from Kyoto. (That much is historical.) Then his daughter, Taki-Yasha-himë, became a… Read More »Samurai Show

Jinja Shinpō continues to carry interesting articles about the ways in which different jinja across Japan have responded to the constraints imposed by COVID-19. Last week, there was an article about a Yasaka Jinja in Hakui City in Ishikawa Prefecture, on the Japan Sea coast. The jinja was founded in the late fifteenth century, with the sharing of the kami from Yasaka Jinja in Kyoto. Thus, it is closely connected to prayers for the end of epidemics, and has an annual Gion Matsuri, like the one in Kyoto, only at… Read More »Taking the Kami to the People

A “yorishiro” is a temporary vessel for kami. They are used when a matsuri is being conducted away from a jinja, where the goshintai (“honourable kami body”) is a permanent vessel for the kami. The scholarly consensus is that in the earliest days of Shinto there were only yorishiro, and that permanent goshintai became part of normal practice around the time Buddhism started to spread in Japan, probably as a result of the influence of Buddhist temples and images. Historically, yorishiro appear to have included trees, rocks, and people. There… Read More »Yorishiro

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a set of links to online videos of matsuri. In the August 3rd issue of Jinja Shinpō there was a report of an extensive, and interesting, discussion of a range of issues concerning the pandemic, including considerable discussion of this point. I’d like to pick that up here. Although the discussion took place online, all three people were from the area around Tokyo. Imai Itaru is a director of Tokyo Jinjachō, and chief priest of a jinja in Tokyo, while Takeda Atsushi is… Read More »Assessing Online Matsuri

Every issue of Jinja Shinpō includes a column in a series called “Komorëbi”, which means “Sunlight through Leaves”. Around a dozen people are asked to write these for two years, taking turns so that each individual writes about eight columns. They normally try to recruit a range of people with Shinto connections, and priests are normally a minority of the authors. A new cycle is just starting, and a couple of weeks ago one of the authors published her first column. She is the newly-appointed chief priest of ten jinja… Read More »Non-Hereditary Priestess