miscellanea nipponica

Where to start? I’ve been collecting links to web sites on Japanese religions for quite some time now, mostly while doing research for my thesis. With this five-part series series of posts, I’ll try to put them in some sort of order. This first post in the series will just give you some links to sites that deal with Japanese religion(s) in general. The rest of the posts will follow the pattern of Shintō and Folk Religion - Buddhism - Christianity - shinshūkyō (New Religions), which seems to be the norm with most printed standard works on the subject.

Continue reading ‘Researching Japanese Religions on the Web (1) - General’

Separated at birth?

To the left, the Edo-era emaki character now thought to be the inspiration for Nurikabe (ぬりかべ), the popular yōkai character from Gegege no Kitarō; to the right, the Mizuki version)

(via Blue Moa)

Edit: Speaking of yōkai, here’s a great post from Pink Tentacle on O-nyudo.

These are far scarier specimen than anything Akutagawa has ever described. Even more so because of the quasi-scientific nature of the description.

Check out more sketches by Ito Keisuke here.