Full Blog Archive

  • Shrine Shinto Confronts Internationalisation, Part One

    Last Sunday (February 21st, just in case this draft takes longer than anticipated and I forget to edit the beginning) I attended a small symposium at Kokugakuin University on the subject “Shrine Shinto Confronts Internationalisation”. I found out about it because Professor Havens, one of the participants, posted about it on the English-language Shinto mailing…

  • Mortgage

    Today I signed the contract for my mortgage. Apart from well and truly confirming that I am now middle-aged, why is this significant? Well, I got it from a big Japanese bank (Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (MUFG), one of the three megabanks), I’m foreign, and I don’t have permanent residence. According to received wisdom in…

  • Kamimeguro Hikawa Shrine

    Kamimeguro Hikawa Shrine is a fairly ordinary urban shrine, its precincts sandwiched between high buildings and lacking in old, impressive trees. “Kamimeguro” is the name of the area, and the “kami” just means “upper”; it is, apparently, not connected to the word for Shinto kami, although quite a lot of people have thought it was.…

My Old Pages

These are links to my old webpages, from back before I moved to a wordpress-powered blog. Back when I wrote the HTML by hand in a text editor. Yes, really. The formatting on some of the pages has broken a bit, and there are newer versions of some of the content in the current part of the site. Nothing here is maintained, nor likely to have anything done with it in the future.