Ancient Japanese Rituals

Ernest Mason Satow's Ancient Japanese Rituals, originally published in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1879 and available today through the Internet Sacred Text Archive, is an early English translation of norito, the formal ritual prayers of Shinto liturgy, made by a British diplomat and pioneering scholar of Japanese who was among the first Western writers to translate this material directly from Japanese sources. Its strength is that it is a primary text translation made by a specialist working directly from the original norito rather than through Chinese or secondary intermediaries, valuable specifically as an early, careful rendering. Its limit is its age, nearly a century and a half, during which both Shinto studies and translation practice have advanced considerably, so a precise point of interpretation should be checked against a modern scholarly translation of the norito rather than treated as reflecting current understanding.