A studio in Kyoto.

What we do

We work on Japanese ceremonial entertainment from both sides. At home, we build and run the digital presence of Japanese shrines, assist with their festivals, and design the objects they give to visitors. Abroad, we export the same capabilities as defined commissions: performance, staging, and artifacts.

Both halves feed each other. The shrine work is where we learn what the forms actually are and how they are properly handled. The export work is where that gets built into something an international audience can receive.

Where we come from

We run our own tour and workshop business in Kyoto — we designed the site, wrote its English editorial, built the booking and staffing systems, and we still run it. We also publish a Japanese-language review site covering immersive theatre and alternate reality games, which means we watch this field closely as an audience as well as a maker.

Nobody commissioned either of those. We built them with our own money and we have kept them running. That is a more useful thing to know about us than a client list.

How we handle the material

This is the part that tends to go wrong when Japanese ceremonial forms travel, so we are explicit about it.

• We do not stage Shinto rites themselves. Where a ceremonial form is real, we say so and cite the source. Where a piece is our own composition, we say that too.
• We do not invent history to fill a gap. On shrine projects we work from primary sources, and we keep documented history typographically distinct from oral tradition.
• We do not present a shrine, a lineage, or a practitioner as endorsing work they have not seen.
• We do not build anything that gets in the way of people who came to worship.

What we are not

We are small — a studio with a network of performers and makers. We would rather tell you that than imply a scale we do not have. In practice it means the people you brief are the people who build it, and it means we cannot take on everything at once.

Our shrine portfolio is also still short. We say so on the Japanese side of this site as well.

Details

Name

NEOJINJA

Based in

Kyoto, Japan

Working

Japan / Worldwide

Languages

Japanese, English

Contact

[email protected]

Incorporation is in progress. We will publish the registered name and address here once it completes; until then we list the trading name and contact only, rather than something that is not yet true.