Category: Literature

Here we have another example of a book that does what it says on the cover; a recounting of one year’s festivals and activities at a Shinto shrine, together with comments from various of the priests on matters connected to Shinto, Japan, and the shrine’s operation. The writing is clear and lively, and it gives,…

This book, subtitled “Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship”, is the product of extensive research into the Inari cult in contemporary (early 1990s) Japan. The author spent a year at Fushimi Inari Taisha, the oldest Inari shrine and still, in some sense, the centre of the cult, and a further year at…

The author of this book on Shinto is primarily a philosopher of religion, not a historian, and thus he approaches Shinto from a philosophical perspective. One result is that this book is not really a very good introduction to Shinto. It is easy to read, and assumes no background knowledge (as far as I can…

This book, in the series Simple Guides, is, as you would expect, a simple guide to Shinto. It is very short, and took me about an hour to read, and thus can only hope to cover a basic outline of Shinto. However, if you know nothing about the religion, that’s exactly what you need to…