digital world

I have mentioned the use of crowdfunding in the Shinto community before, and in this post I am going to introduce one that is currently active. This is organised by Daini no Furusato Sōsei Kyōkai (Second Hometown Creation Group, although the official English translation is apparently “The Japanese Festival and Forest Association”), an organisation I have done quite a bit with — they organise the volunteers for Natsumoude at Asakusa Jinja, which I have done several times. This crowdfunding is for replanting the sacred forest at a jinja in Iwatë… Read More »Crowdfunding Trees

The February 5th issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article by a senior staff member of Okayama Prefectural Jinjachō, about their digital transition. This transition seems to have been driven by the head of the Jinjachō, which is probably how the first examples had to happen. There seem to be two main elements to this transition. First, they have stopped requiring inkan stamps (the name stamps that used to be needed on everything back when I first came to Japan, eeee, those were the good old days, where’re my glasses,… Read More »Digital Okayama

Jinja Shinpō has an irregular series of short opinion pieces by journalists working on the paper, printed on the first page. (In weeks when they do not have one, they print a short explanation of why they appear to be spelling so many words wrong — they use the pre-war conventions for kana choice, although they do use hiragana rather than katakana.) The 19th June issue had one, about changes in society. It started by discussing the problems that the law was having keeping up with generative AI, particularly the… Read More »AI Norito

The December 12th issue of Jinja Shinpō had an interesting front-page article about cashless payment systems and the implications for jinja. It turns out that introducing such facilities at jinja is not at all straightforward. First, there are four different types of cashless payment in Japan, and they are covered by different laws. These are pre-paid systems, funds transfer systems, direct bank payment systems, and credit systems. The law for pre-paid systems does not allow them to be used for charitable donations, as they must be used to pay for… Read More »Cashless Systems

When I posted about the process of writing out norito at Jingū a couple of weeks ago, I had a comment about the possibilities for digitalisation. That very topic, complete with a reference to the article that inspired my blog post, was taken up in a book review in the October 3rd issue of Jinja Shinpō. The review was of a collection of norito for regular matsuri written by the chief priest of Akasaka Hië Jinja in Tokyo, and the comments were inspired by the fact that the book includes… Read More »Digitising Norito