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David Chart

Mountain Kami

A couple of weeks ago I went to Kyūshū with my wife, and we visited some jinja. I want to write about two of them here, one in this post and the other in the next. The first one is at Kirishima Jingū (霧島神宮), a jinja that venerates Ninigi-no-mikoto, the grandson of Amaterasu Ōmikami who founded the Imperial line, at the mountain where he is said to have descended from the heavens. The jinja is ancient, and the main sanctuary buildings (which date from the eighteenth century) were designated National… Read More »Mountain Kami

Issues at the Oversight Council

The Oversight Council (評議員会) of Jinja Honchō (神社本庁) meets twice a year, in May and October, and this year the October meeting was on the 24th, and reported in the November 3rd issue of Jinja Shinpō (神社新報). In recent years, meetings of this council have been dominated by a series of related scandals (the court case and the disputed presidency), but all of those issues have now been resolved, and this has made a difference. The disputed presidency is still an ongoing issue, because Jinja Honchō is looking into whether… Read More »Issues at the Oversight Council

Daijōsai Purification

The Daijōsai (affiliate link!) (大嘗祭) is a sacred ceremony performed on the accession of a new Tennō, in which that new Tennō offers rice and other food to the kami in specially built ritual buildings. The linked essay has a lot more detail about the ceremony in general. In this post, I want to write about an article in issue 274 of The Journal of Shintō Studies (神道宗教), “Emperor Sutoku’s Daijōsai Ceremony as Recorded in Hosshōjidono on-shidai: An Analysis of the Comments Concerning Rites Preceding the Main Rite”, by Kimura… Read More »Daijōsai Purification

Imperial Prayers

The Summer 2025 issue of The Imperial Family (皇室) included an article reporting a discussion between Tanaka Tsunekiyo, the president of Jinja Honchō, and Okeya Ryōyū, the head of Nenpō Shinkyō. Nenpō Shinkyō is relatively new Buddhist group, founded exactly a hundred years ago, with its headquarters in Osaka. According to the article, it has about 387,000 members, and it has just finished building its central temple. The discussion took place there, and it really looks quite spectacular. Nenpō Shinkyō is an example of a Buddhist practice with strong Shinto… Read More »Imperial Prayers

The Ōmiwa Clan

Volume 273 of the Journal of Shinto Studies (神道宗教 — note that the official English title is not a translation of the Japanese) included an article by Suzuki Akifusa (鈴木顕房) on “The Relationship between the Ōmiwa Clan and the Miwayama Ritual”. Miwayama (三輪山), Mt Miwa, is a small mountain in Nara Prefecture that is very important for the early history of Shinto. It is currently the site of Ōmiwa Jinja (大神神社), and there are a number of early archaeological sites, which are among the earliest evidence for practices that can… Read More »The Ōmiwa Clan

Kami at a Buddhist Temple

The 27th October issue of Jinja Shinpō  included a very thought-provoking article about… an interaction between Shinto and Buddhism. One of the reasons it was thought-provoking is that I am not exactly sure how to characterise it. The event happened at Honryūin (本龍院), a Buddhist temple in Tokyo generally known as Matsuchiyama Shōden (待乳山聖天). The resident priest, Revd Hirata, had found a reference in an early nineteenth-century text to a mikoshi procession based on the temple, and decided to revive it. Revd Haji, the chief priest of Asakusa Jinja (浅草神社),… Read More »Kami at a Buddhist Temple