David Chart

The March 2nd issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article about Mimusubi. Admittedly, it was by me. The article was an explicit response to an article published in December, by a priest from Aichi Prefecture. That article was officially about how omamori are, and should be, treated in Reiwa, the current Japanese era. However, the main message was that jinja should avoid supplying omamori to foreigners, because they will just resell them online, treat them badly, and throw them away. He also mentioned that he felt fed up at seeing… Read More »Mimusubi in Jinja Shinpō

The second question raised for me by A Path into the Mountains (still an affiliate link!) was “Can Buddhas be venerated as kami?”. The reverse is clearly possible, as it is generally agreed to have been common for about a thousand years of Japanese history. Kami were taken to be provisional manifestations of more fundamental Buddhas — forms taken to enable the Buddhas to bring enlightenment to the Japanese. Thus, the kami were revered as Buddhas, and this was a standard part of Japanese Buddhism. What about the reverse? Is… Read More »Buddhas as Kami

I have recently read A Path into the Mountains, by Caleb Swift Carter. (Affiliate link!) The book is about historical practice at Togakushi Jinja (戸隠神社), and I have to confess that I had a serious problem with the methodology. Essentially, Carter’s position is that if a tradition doesn’t, institutionally, look like Tendai Buddhism, with a coherent set of deities, doctrines, and lineages, then it probably doesn’t exist, and certainly isn’t important. This results in the claim that Shinto only became involved at Togakushi in the mid Edo-period, because there is… Read More »Shugendō and Shinto

The February 9th issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article about a sword. About five years ago, Kumata Jinja (杭全神社) in Osaka was sorting out a store room for the jinja’s treasures, and they found a box with eight swords bundled inside. It seems that there were no helpful records at the jinja, because they called in an expert. He looked at them, and said that it was very likely that one of them was the work of Gojō Kuninaga, a swordsmith active in the mid-eleventh century. The swords had… Read More »A Sword Discovered

I have occasionally threatened to write a book entitled And Then It Burnt Down: An Architectural History of Japan, because fires are such a recurrent part of Japanese architectural history. Indeed, in the Edo period the saying was that the Edo (modern Tokyo) had two sorts of flowers: fights and fires. (The original Japanese doesn’t alliterate as nicely as the English translation.) Concerns with fire prevention are still very strong in Japan, and the front page of the February 2nd issue of Jinja Shinpō was all about one of these… Read More »Fire Prevention