Enduring Identities

‘Enduring Identities: The Guise of Shinto in Contemporary Japan’ by John K. Nelson  
Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii, 2000  324 pages, medium size.  ISBN 0-8248-2259-5  $25

This book by John Nelson (now at Univ. of San Francisco) could be described as ‘A Year in the Life of a Shrine’ part two.  Despite its title, it is a concentrated study of a single shrine in the north of Kyoto known as Kamigamo Jinja.  The book is comprehensive and detailed, covering all the salient activities of the shrine such as its priestly structure and rites.  As the clan shrine of the Kamo tribe,  the 1400 year old Kamigamo Shrine has a very particular history, to which much space is devoted.  This and the sometimes tedious recounting of every single event at the shrine must make the book of limited value to a general readership, and though the writing is accessible, the author is sometimes at pains to place the book within anthropological models.  On the other hand, for those who would like to get on the ‘inside’ of a shrine the book offers up much valuable and authoritative information.  It certainly helps if one is familiar with the shrine in question, though maps and descriptions fill in a lot of the context.

Summary: An extremely thorough and scholarly book, likely to appeal only to those eager to go into the details of Shinto.  Others might prefer Nelson’s earlier work ‘A Year in the Life of a Shrine’.