journal of shinto studies

The combined Issue 275/276 of the Journal of Shinto Studies (神道宗教) included an article by Itō Yūsukë (伊東裕介) on the requests made by the Tennō of the kami in the Heian period, around a thousand years ago. The article concentrates on Tennō from the late ninth and early tenth centuries, when the system was just getting established. The article focuses on two questions. The first concerns the name used for this practice, which in later years was “gogan” (御願). Itō confirmed that, in the time period he was looking at,… Read More »Requests of the Tennō

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

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

This will be my final post about the articles in issue 269 of the Journal of Shinto Studies, although the combined issue 270/271 has just arrived, and may contain material of interest. The article I am writing about today is “Disasters, Contagion, and the Consolation of Spirits: What is Needed for Consolation?” by Nomura Makoto. This article is also a summary of a presentation at the annual conference, but unlike most of the others it does not give many details about the argument, so I can only give the overall… Read More »Which Spirits are Consoled?

It has been a while since I posted about the articles in issue 269 of the Journal of Shinto Studies, but there are still a couple I want to write about, and one of them is about Shichigosan, so this seems like a good time to cover it — November is still the peak of Shichigosan season, even if it has become rather extended. The article, “On Shifts in the Celebration and Meaning of Shichigosan: An Examination from the Perspectives of Grandmother, Mother, and Child” by Taguchi Yūko, has a… Read More »Shichigosan Across the Generations

The question of how jinja should respond to the changes in society driven by the information revolution is important, and there were several presentation reports in the Journal of Shintō Studies that took up aspects of that theme. One, by Liu Simon (I’m guessing he has non-Japanese roots) was on crowdfunding: “The Possibilities and Significance of Using Crowdfunding by Shrines: The Cases of Tenmangū in Osaka and Kunōzan Tōshōgū”. Mr Liu (he was a graduate student) did a survey of the main Japanese crowdfunding sites in 2020, and found only… Read More »Crowdfunding