Sacred woods dissertation

The finished dissertation with its intriguing title

Congratulation to Green Shinto friend, Aike Rots, who has just completed his dissertation on Sacred Forests in Japan.  His research took him to some of the most interesting shrines working along environmental principles, as documented in a previous posting.  It’s ground-breaking work in at least one sense (!) and we look forward to seeing the work in published form one day.

Aike writes: ‘The dissertation is now going to be sent to the defense committee. If they decide that it is good enough for defense, this will become the final version, and it will be printed/published by the university. I assume that from that moment I can send the PDF to anybody who is interested, but I’ll have to check whether there are any rules for this. After my defense I will also get in touch with publishers to turn it into a real book. That will probably require some rewriting though, so it may take a while.’

Wayside shrine on the way to Rinno-ji in Nikko