David Chart

The ongoing pandemic seriously disrupted the May meeting of Jinja Honchō’s Oversight Council. With states of emergency in effect across much of Japan, including Tokyo, the leadership of Jinja Honchō took the decision to not gather the full Oversight Council, but rather just have a meeting of the Standing Committee. This is permitted by the rules; the Council can vote to allow the Standing Committee to perform some of its functions in exceptional circumstances, and a pandemic certainly counts. The proposal was sent to all members of the Oversight Council… Read More »Preparing for the Oversight Council

“Saisen” is the money that you offer on a normal jinja visit, dropping it into the offering box before you pay your respects. There is a common custom of offering five yen (about 5c US), because the Japanese for “five yen” sounds like the Japanese for “good connection”, but jinja sometimes say they would like you to offer at least ¥100 (about $1). In any case, the amounts are much smaller than those associated with a formal prayer, which start at about ¥5,000, and are called “hatushoryō” or “tamagushiryō”. There… Read More »The Origins of Saisen

The 3rd May issue of Jinja Shinpō had a very interesting article about Kashima Jingū, an ancient jinja in Ibaraki Prefecture. The jinja claims to be well over 2500 years old, which is probably not true, but there are archaeological discoveries from the fifth century, so it is certainly over 1500 years old. The article was about part of the jinja’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is currently holding proxy matsuri on the first day of every month, for the benefit of people who cannot currently travel to the… Read More »Veneration by Proxy

I’ve been asked to give some recommendations for books to read in Japanese about Shinto, because some of the people following my blog can read Japanese. If you can’t, this post is not going to be of much use to you — sorry. My first recommendation is the official texts for the Jinja Kentei. At least some of these are available from Amazon US (and I have added affiliate links), which is one reason to recommend them. However, Amazon Japan will also ship overseas, so I have added (affiliate) links… Read More »Jinja Kentei Textbooks 1

A couple of weeks ago, one of my patrons asked me if there were kami outside Japan. The answer is not entirely straightforward, so it gets a blog post. First, there are two related questions that do have entirely straightforward answers. Non-Japanese people may venerate the Japanese kami within Shinto (Jinja Honchō is taking active steps to encourage that among visitors to Japan), and the Japanese kami may be venerated outside Japan (Imperial Japan founded a number of overseas jinja for that purpose, as did Japanese emigrants in the late… Read More »Kami Outside Japan

Yasukuni Jinja, in Tokyo, enshrines the spirits of everyone who died fighting for the Tennō between, roughly, 1854 and 1945. (The main reason that there are no later enshrinements is that no-one has died fighting for the Tennō since then.) It is, as you are almost certainly aware, extremely controversial, because of its association with Japanese imperialism. The previous Tennō never visited the jinja as Tennō, and I am not sure whether the current Tennō has ever visited it at all. At any rate, he has not visited since becoming… Read More »Imperial Envoy to Yasukuni