What Is Shinto? Japan's Way of the Spirits

The tradition is about kami, a word usually translated as gods or spirits but covering more than either. Kami are the presences in the world that inspire awe: the sun, mountains, waterfalls, old trees and unusual rocks; the spirits of ancestors and of great people; the deities of the old myths, such as the sun goddess Amaterasu; and the forces behind growth, fertility and storms. A thing becomes kami by being extraordinary. The eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga defined a kami as anything that is out of the ordinary and inspires a sense of wonder, and the traditional count of eight million is a way of saying there is no count.

Kami are not omnipotent, not necessarily moral and not remote. They live in particular places, they can be pleased or offended, and the point of Shinto practice is to keep on good terms with them: to thank them, to ask their help, and above all to approach them clean.

The central idea is purity, and its opposite is not sin but pollution, kegare, which comes from death, blood, disease and disorder and can be washed off. Every shrine has a basin at the entrance where visitors rinse their hands and mouth before approaching, and the major rituals of the tradition are purifications, from the priest waving a wand of paper streamers over a new car to the great ceremonies that cleanse the whole nation twice a year. A shrine visit follows a simple sequence:

• •Pass under the torii, which marks the boundary between the ordinary world and the kami's
• •Rinse hands and mouth at the water basin
• •Approach the hall of worship, drop a coin in the offering box and ring the bell if there is one
• •Bow twice, clap twice to call the kami's attention, make a silent request or thanks, and bow once more
• •Optionally buy an amulet, draw a paper fortune or write a wish on a wooden plaque to hang at the shrine

Shinto had no name until it needed one. When Buddhism arrived from Korea in the sixth century, the native practices were called the way of the kami, shin-to, to distinguish them, and for the next twelve hundred years the two lived in the same buildings. Kami were understood as local manifestations of Buddhas, Buddhist priests ran shrines, and most Japanese saw no contradiction in praying to both. The great myths were written down in the eighth century in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, chronicles that trace the imperial family's descent from Amaterasu, and those texts became the nearest thing Shinto has to scripture.

In 1868 the new Meiji government forcibly separated the two, expelling Buddhism from the shrines, and built State Shinto: a national cult centred on the divine emperor, taught in schools and used to bind the nation through the wars of the twentieth century. The American occupation dismantled it in 1945, the emperor renounced his divinity, and shrines became private religious bodies. The legacy is still contested, most visibly at Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, where the war dead, including convicted war criminals, are enshrined as kami and prime ministers' visits provoke protests from China and Korea.

Modern practice is mostly seasonal and communal rather than doctrinal. Babies are presented at the shrine a month after birth, children at three, five and seven, and couples often marry in Shinto ceremonies, while funerals are almost always Buddhist, a division of labour that has lasted a millennium. Every neighbourhood shrine holds an annual festival, matsuri, in which the kami is carried through the streets in a portable shrine on the shoulders of the young men and, increasingly, women of the district, with food stalls, drums and drink. The New Year visit, the summer festivals and the small household altar are how most Japanese meet the tradition, and the Grand Shrine at Ise, home of Amaterasu, is rebuilt from new timber every twenty years, as it has been since the seventh century.

Outside Japan, Shinto's most visible export is aesthetic. The reverence for natural things, the preference for plain wood and empty space, the sense that a place can be sacred without being explained, run through Japanese gardens, architecture, and the films of Hayao Miyazaki, whose forest spirits and bathhouse for the gods are recognisably kami.

Visitors to Japan often find shrines and temples hard to tell apart, since both have wooden halls, gardens and crowds at New Year. A few clues help. Shinto shrines have torii at their entrances, twisted ropes of rice straw called shimenawa hung with white zigzag paper strips to mark sacred objects and spaces, and often a pair of guardian lion-dogs, or foxes at shrines to the rice kami Inari. Their names usually end in jinja, jingu or taisha. Buddhist temples, whose names often end in ji or dera, have images of Buddhas, incense burners and sometimes a pagoda or graveyard.

The deepest difference is what sits in the innermost hall. A temple displays statues of the Buddha and bodhisattvas for people to see and venerate. A shrine usually keeps its kami out of sight, housed in an object such as a mirror, a sword or a stone that ordinary worshippers never view, and some of the oldest shrines have no main hall at all because the mountain behind them is itself the kami. Many shrines also keep a grove of old trees around them, a reminder that sacred space in Shinto often began as a natural place rather than a building.

Several objects found at shrines trace back to a single episode in the Kojiki. The sun goddess Amaterasu, offended by the wild behaviour of her brother Susanoo, shut herself away in a cave, and the world fell into darkness. The other kami gathered outside, hung a mirror and strings of jewels on a sacred tree, and the goddess Ame-no-Uzume danced so wildly on an upturned tub that the assembled gods roared with laughter. Curious about the noise, Amaterasu peered out, caught sight of her own radiance in the mirror and was drawn out, and a rope was stretched across the cave mouth to stop her going back.

The story is read as the origin of things still central to shrine life: the mirror as a dwelling place for a kami, the sacred dances called kagura, and the twisted rope that marks off holy space. The mirror is also one of the three imperial regalia, said to have come down from Amaterasu to the imperial line along with a sword and a curved jewel. Tradition places the mirror at Ise, the sword at Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya and the jewel at the Imperial Palace. None of them is shown to the public, and even at enthronements the sword and jewel are presented in closed containers.

The Grand Shrine of Ise, the most sacred site in Shinto, is completely rebuilt about every twenty years on an adjacent plot, in a ceremony called Shikinen Sengu. Carpenters construct exact copies of the main buildings in unpainted cypress wood, using traditional methods, and the sacred objects are moved to the new shrine before the old one is dismantled.

The custom has continued, with interruptions, for well over a thousand years, and the most recent rebuilding was completed in 2013. It expresses ideas central to Shinto, renewal and purity, and it also passes building skills from one generation to the next, since each rebuilding requires craftsmen who learned from the previous one. In a sense the shrine is both ancient and always new.

Shinto is Japan's indigenous tradition of reverence for kami, the spirits of extraordinary places, things, ancestors and natural forces, practised at shrines through purification, offering and seasonal festival rather than through doctrine. It lived intertwined with Buddhism for over a thousand years, was turned into a state cult in the nineteenth century and dismantled in 1945, and today it is less a religion people belong to than a set of customs most Japanese take part in.