David Chart

The Nihon Ryōiki is a collection of myths written around 800 by a Buddhist monk called Kyōkai. It is not often mentioned in the context of Shinto, despite its age, because it is normally described as a collection of Buddhist “setsuwa”, or exemplary tales. And, “obviously”, if it is a collection of Buddhist stories, it can’t be of any relevance to Shinto. As I oh-so-subtly indicated by my use of scare quotes, I do not entirely agree. I have just read a selection of stories from it as part of… Read More »Nihon Ryōiki

All jinja that are affiliated with Jinja Honchō have to pay annual dues. I am not sure how much they are, but they are significant, because Jinja Honchō has an annual budget of around ¥5 billion, which would make the average contribution per jinja about ¥60,000, or $600. Bear in mind that this includes tiny jinja out in rural areas with no income. The average contribution per priest is about ¥250,000, or about $2,500. When jinja are struck by a crisis, the dues to Jinja Honchō have the potential to… Read More »Paying Dues

One of the major social problems facing Japan at the moment is the depopulation of rural areas. In fact, the underlying problem is the depopulation of anywhere that isn’t greater Tokyo, but it is not yet a crisis for regional cities. In rural areas, however, there are villages where the average age is over seventy, and the youngest people are in their fifties. The general consensus is that almost all of those communities will vanish in the next couple of decades. This creates a particular problem for the Shinto world,… Read More »Jinja and Depopulation

Quite a bit of the work I do for Jinja Honchō is internal translations, and the most recent pamphlet I developed for them wasn’t put online, so I haven’t been able to introduce any of my work in detail for quite a while. However, I now have a chance. Jinja Honchō has prepared a set of pictograms for jinja to use to provide guidance to visitors about the jinja’s COVID-19 precautions. You can download them from the Jinja Honchō website. As well as PDF and PNG versions, you can download… Read More »Practical Pictograms

Every year, the publicity department at Jingū produces a magazine called “Musuhi”. This is a very lightweight publication, about sixteen pages, with a lot of colour photographs and nice images of Jingū. I will base this post on last year’s; this year’s has just been published, and was announced in last week’s Jinja Shinpō, which is why I decided to write about it even though I don’t have it yet. However, the content is broadly the same from year to year, and towards the back of the magazine, I think… Read More »Musuhi

In this week’s Jinja Shinpō, there are a lot of articles about jinja and Shinto groups that have taken various steps to make sure that they can still hold a matsuri, while minimising the chances of spreading COVID-19. In some cases, it was very simple. Miyagiken Gogokoku Jinja simply reduced the number of people attending its annual memorial matsuri by 90%. (This is one of the regional jinja to the war dead, and thus holds a matsuri on August 15th, the day the war ended according to Japan, every year.)… Read More »Matsuri Under COVID-19