![]() ![]() Obviously, there aren’t any such tourists right now, but that just gives us thinking and preparation time. ![]() This is a wide concept that can be used to describe the spirits of deceased loved ones, gods of Japanese mythology, animal spirits and even the deities of other religions such as Buddha or Bodhisattvas. One of the things that I think about, and propose to Jinja Honchō, is ways to create ideas along these lines that might appeal to foreign tourists. Kami are the spirits, gods and deities of Japan's Shinto religion. Obviously, it cannot get too much larger, because all the jinja need to be fairly close together, to make collecting the set a practical proposition. At the moment, there are ten participating jinja, but it has been increasing, and so the group may get a bit larger. In this case, the target area seems to be quite small, and it may not go much beyond encouraging people who have visited one of the jinja to visit the others. Long ago in the open Musashino-no-kuni, it is told that Ookunitama-no-Oogami taught the people how to. The aim is clearly to get people who do not live in a jinja’s immediate area to visit, and it seems to work. This is the same god as Izumos Ookuninushi-no-kami. I have seen this sort of project in other rural areas of Japan as well. Old Japanese stories, Kitsune and Hoshi no tama Thu, July 17, 2014, by Muza-chan Kitsune in Japanese means simply fox', but in the Shinto tradition and in the Japanese folklore, foxes are also mythical creatures, messengers of kami Inari, the god of agriculture, rice and prosperity. The jinja also offer a “kami himo”, or “kami thread”, to put the beads on, and when you get your first one, you also get a map of all the participating jinja. They can be obtained at each jinja, presumably in exchange for a small offering, and serve as a memento of the jinja visit. A kami can also have a rough spirit - ara-mi-tama. These kami tama are wooden beads about 1.5 cm in diameter, with a hole through them for threading onto a string, and an image on the side that is related to their jinja. But even now there is no exact theological concept of Shinto deities. A number of jinja in Ibaraki Prefecture, just to the northeast of Tokyo, have got together to offer “kami tama”, or “kami beads”, to people who visit the jinja, and the June 21 st issue of Jinja Shinpō had a short article about them. ![]()
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