Shinto

What it is

The indigenous religious tradition of Japan, organised around kami.

Kami is usually translated "gods" or "spirits", and both mislead. The eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga defined it as anything that inspires awe — deities, but also exceptional mountains, ancient trees, waterfalls, remarkable people, ancestors, and forces of nature. There are said to be yaoyorozu no kami, eight million of them, meaning innumerable.

Shinto has no founder, no scripture in the ordinary sense, no creed and no systematic theology. The Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720) record mythology and imperial genealogy but function as chronicles rather than as revelation.

What it has instead is practice, organised around a single axis: purity and its opposite. Kegare — pollution, contracted through death, blood, illness, wrongdoing — is removed by harae, purification. This is not sin in the Christian sense; it is closer to a condition that has been acquired and can be washed off, and it carries no permanent moral weight.

Where it came from

From Japanese prehistory, without a founding moment. The word Shintō — the way of the kami — appears only when a name was needed to distinguish local practice from imported Buddhism in the sixth century.

For over a thousand years the two were substantially fused. Shinbutsu shūgō — kami-Buddha syncretism — treated kami as manifestations of buddhas and bodhisattvas, shrines and temples shared sites, and most Japanese made no sharp distinction.

The separation was a nineteenth-century state act. In 1868 the new Meiji government ordered shinbutsu bunri, the forcible separation of kami and Buddha worship, destroying Buddhist images in shrines and dissolving a millennium of combined practice.

What followed is the tradition's darkest chapter. The state constructed State Shinto: a national cult centred on the emperor's divine descent, administered as a patriotic duty rather than a religion, funded and directed by government, and used to underwrite Japanese militarism and empire. Shrines became instruments of national mobilisation.

It was dismantled by the Allied occupation — the Shinto Directive of December 1945 disestablished it, and the emperor's declaration of January 1946 renounced the claim to divinity.

The legacy remains contested. Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines the war dead including convicted war criminals, is a recurring source of diplomatic conflict whenever Japanese ministers visit.

How it is practised

At shrines — jinja — marked by a torii gate indicating the transition from ordinary to sacred space. The visitor rinses mouth and hands at a water basin, approaches, bows twice, claps twice, prays silently, bows again.

Practices include omamori, protective amulets; ema, wooden plaques on which wishes are written and hung; omikuji, paper fortunes; and matsuri, community festivals in which the kami is carried through the streets in a portable shrine.

Hatsumōde, the first shrine visit of the new year, draws on the order of a hundred million visits in Japan across a few days.

Shinto weddings and Buddhist funerals are the common pattern — a division of religious labour most Japanese find unremarkable.

What we can and cannot say

We can say Western categories fit badly here, and that this is the most useful thing to understand about it. Surveys consistently find that a majority of Japanese people describe themselves as non-religious, while the same population makes hundreds of millions of shrine visits a year, buys amulets, holds Shinto weddings and observes the festival calendar.

That is not hypocrisy or confusion. It reflects a tradition in which participation, not belief, is the operative category — where the question "do you believe in the kami?" is close to unintelligible, because nothing is being asserted that could be believed or doubted. Orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, and a religion that never required assent to anything.

We can say the shrine forests matter ecologically as well as religiously. Chinju no mori, the groves surrounding shrines, function as the conservation instrument described under sacred trees and groves, preserving old-growth vegetation in a densely developed country.

We can say the State Shinto period is not incidental to the tradition's history and should not be omitted. A religion without doctrine proved unusually easy for a state to fill with one, and the result was used to justify a war. That is a warning about religion generally rather than about Shinto specifically, and it is a real one.

We cannot describe kami adequately in English, and the tradition's own scholars have said so for centuries.

Further reading

• Helen Hardacre, Shinto: A History (2017) — the major modern scholarly account, thorough on the State Shinto period.
• Motoori Norinaga's writings on kami, in translation.
• The Kojiki, in Gustav Heldt's translation (2014).