Month: September 2011
-
Hayashi Razan’s “HonchÅ Jinja KÅ” — Shinto Texts Course 7
The summer holiday is over, and yesterday the Shinto Texts course at Kokugakuin University started again, with a lecture on Hayashi Razan’s HonchÅ Jinja KÅ. I am confident that very few of my readers will have heard of either the author or the text, but both were of great significance in the history of Shinto,…
-
Shirahata Hachiman Daijin Festival
The annual Grand Festival of Shirahata Hachiman Daijin, our local shrine, was held last weekend. The festival itself is on the Sunday, and on the previous day, the Saturday, there is a children’s mikoshi procession. A mikoshi is a portable shrine, based on the palanquins in which the nobility were carried in Heian times (about…
-
Thinking About the Report
This session of the Kawasaki Foreigners’ Assembly is coming to an end. We still have about six months to go, but that’s only four normal meetings, so we have to get started on deciding our final report and suggestions to the city government. In Sunday’s session, the Life and Society Subcommittee did manage to get…
-
Visit Tohoku! Aizu
I’ve been to Tohoku again, this time on a family trip in the middle of July. We spent two nights and three days in the Aizu region of Fukushima Prefecture. Yes, that is the Fukushima Prefecture that has the broken nuclear power station. However, it’s one of the largest prefectures in Japan, and the Aizu…
-
Japanese Prime Ministers
I’m sorry it’s been so long since I updated this blog; we went to the UK in the summer, and that ate up a lot of time. I have a bunch of things to post, and I’ve started working on them, so I’ll keep this entry short, just to bring some life back to the…