work for jinja honcho

Another question that came up on my Patreon after my post about the future of Shinto was the question of how I saw Shinto developing outside Japan. Obviously, I am directly involved in that, so I have rather more concrete goals than I do for the future of Jinja Shinto within Japan. The first point to make this time is that very few people outside Japan have even heard of Shinto. Readers of this blog are members of an intellectual elite! The purpose of Mimusubi is to make it easier… Read More »Shinto Overseas

Jinja Honchō has just put two new English videos on its official YouTube channel, about participating in a formal prayer at a jinja. The first is about how to offer a tamagushi. This is a standard part of almost any formal prayer, but it is something that most Japanese people have no idea how to do. Hence the need for the instructional video in Japanese, which created the opportunity to prepare one in English as well. The second is a bit of a novel departure for Jinja Honchō. It’s a… Read More »Formal Prayer Videos

Last week, I was at the meeting of the Secretariat of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, in Astana, Kazakhstan, as half of Jinja Honchō’s delegation. As it turned out, I had a lot less to do than last year. First, our Liaison Officer used to work at the Kazakhstan Embassy in Tokyo, so we already knew him, and he speaks good Japanese. That meant I did not need to interpret between him and Revd Mitsui. And then it turned out that they were providing simultaneous Japanese… Read More »Kazakhstan Congress

I have mentioned before on this blog that I wrote a booklet for Jinja Honchō entitled “Jinja: Heart of Japan” to serve as their general introduction to Shinto for foreigners. Most of the content was incorporated into Jinja Honchō’s English language website, and has been available for a while, but the only way to see the full booklet was to get hold of a physical copy. That has changed. The PDF is now available on their website. As you can see, there are nine languages available. The choice of languages… Read More »Jinja: Heart of Japan in PDF

Jinja Honchō has recently published three new videos on the etiquette for visiting a jinja. They aren’t really three videos, though, because the two short ones are just extracts from the full-length one. I will link to the full one first; it’s about four minutes long. As you can see, it not only has English on-screen captions, but it has an English narration. I did the English adaptation, but Jinja Honchō hired a professional to do the voice-over. She was really good; we had to do one retake because she… Read More »Visiting a Shinto Jinja: Attitude and Etiquette