Shinto Shrine Blesses Gadgets

Date: 2009 June 29 04:13

Posted by Joe

Wired are currently running a feature article about the technology blessings at the Kanda Shrine near Akihabara in Tokyo. For a small fee (800 Yen, which is about 5GBP or 8 USD) you can get good luck charms that look like microchips to protect your favourite gadget, or for 5,000 Yen (about 30 GBP / 50 USD) you can get a private blessing ceremony.

Apparently the Shinto shrine started doing IT blessings when Windows XP went on sale in Japan. The local otaku started to snap up the protection talismans to prevent system crashes, and from then on the requests started flooding in. Apart from gadgets the shrine will even bless blogs and ISP services!

Update: Spike reminds me that we covered this story last year, before it was covered on Wired.