I took a Japanese sociology class in undergrad, and one of the things that really stuck with me was a description of kami from a 17th century Japanese philosopher as anything that is “awe-inspiring.” It doesn’t have to necessarily be good or evil, big or small, strong or weak, just “awe-inspiring.”

I always thought this description really helps Westerners understand the difference between Shinto kami and gods of Western religions. In Western religions, Gods are big, huge and powerful, and kami don’t necessarily have to be. It also helped me wrap my head around why Western religions emphasize big and grand cathedrals and mosques while Shinto places of worship are sometimes the simplest and most plain locations–the simplicity can inspire awe in it’s beauty.

I think the most interesting thing for me when I visit Japan is how interwoven Shinto is with the culture. My friends who live there don’t necessarily think of Shinto as a religion as much as something just ingrained in their culture. Also a very different concept from Western thought, where religion is almost always separated from everyday life and you are very aware when you are doing something “religious.” I would feel very odd going into a church without wanting to learn more about the religion or beliefs, so the concept of going into Shinto shrines and participating in the rituals felt very sacrilegious to me. But it wasn’t! I found that absolutely fascinating.

Very interesting and helpful article. There are some point of Shinto familiar with my country ancient belief such as animism, sacred spirit, good spirit and evil spirit…and a Goddess is considered to be most famous spirit as well.

Shinto is the origin of Japanese beliefs, But i’m still confuse about the concept that both of men and women can becomes shinto priest moreover they able to married but why the daughter from shinto priest can’t be able to married?? this rule is not fair at all i guess……. http://okonomikatsu.blogspot.com/

Just seems really supersitious to me, not meaning to disrespect it though.

It depends how you look at the data. By some studies, Shinto is about even with Christianity, but no matter how you look at it, Shinto, Buddhism, and Christianity are definitely the big 3. Assuming you don’t count “non-religious”.

The daughters can get married, just not if they want to be a miko.

So in life a Japanese person will practice Shinto, but then seek a Buddhist to handle the death and the funeral? It seems odd that the Shinto religion would elect to ignore such a significant event that is encountered many times in one life, and happens to everyone without exception. I am aware of the ceremony and traditions for festivals and prayers, but leaving death out of it seems disconnected. I also feel that experiences surrounding death are disconnected from life in America, but this only contributes to the event being more disruptive and unnatural, when in Biological terms, it is anything but.

Sooo… while it’s true that Shinto is based on the animism that existed in Japan before the first arrival of scholars from China, Shinto as it stands today is somewhat more recent. When the Buddhists first came to Japan, they went “so, you worship kami? That’s ok, they’re just Buddhas, come to you in a form you can understand” – so from the beginning of recorded history in Japan, it had basically been subsumed by Buddhism (the process is called “syncretisism”).

During the Meiji restoration, however, the new Meiji government, who were in need of a state religion that was different to the Buddhism that had been used by the Tokugawa Shogunate before them, split Shintoism from Buddhism, and basically went “Look! It’s our traditional religion, that we’ve all been following all along, remember?”

Yes, it’s common knowledge now. Trees grow from seeds, the seasons are caused by the tilt of the planet, the sun travels across the sky because Amaterasu throws a long pass to Ra in the eternal football game of the cosmos.

Wasn’t there some sort of religious war in Japan more than a thousand years ago? I could swear it involved Shinto, Tao, and/or Buddhism. I’m pretty sure it was two of those, but I didn’t find anything when I searched it just now. All I can remember is that the two sides were at war until they realized that they could actually co-exist and keep society more or less the same.

I might be mistaken, though.

There are quite some problems with ‘Shinto” and even the term religion itself in Japan. Shinto as we know it is a Meiji government invention (invented tradition) because at the time western nations had a (state) religion and the Japanese though that was what Japan missed. They were seen as monkeys so they had to defend themselves in some way. In the same period Genji Monogatari and such works were ‘rediscovered’; “Look what we have had all along! We’re no less than western nations!”

Shinto and Buddhism has been the same thing all along, even today, how many ‘Buddhist” temples are there with ‘Shinto” Torii’s protecting them?

You might want to read this, if you have access via a university.

Kuroda Toshio, “Shinto in the history of Japanese Religion”, Journal of Japanese Studies VII-1, 1981, pp. 1-21.

Most Japanese people are not full fledged Shinto or Buddhist, rather they do a little of both. This is actually a good example of this religious “fusion” in Japan. The Shinto religion places heavy influence cleanliness and ritualistic bathing, death is considered unclean, thus they leave funerals to Buddhism. That being said, it’s not like Shinto is leaving out death and in fact many dead ancestors and family members are thought to be Shinto kami after they die, and many Japanese have ancestral shrines even right in their house. And like I mentioned before many Japanese adhere to both religions, and visit both Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples during their lifetime, so it’s not so much that they’ve been a full-fledged Shinto follower their whole life and then suddenly sought out a Buddhist priest for a funeral ceremony, but this is rather a perfect example of how most Japanese practice both religions.

Close, recent research has shown that Pluto is actually a dwarf god.

You’re getting downvoted, but you’re more correct than you realize. As Kyo pointed out above, “Shinto” as a religion is really just an invented tradition, and is in truth just a collection of Japanese superstitions.

One interesting thing about Shinto is that it is different in every. single. shrine you visit. One shrine will say this, the next shrine – literally down the road – will say another thing. Each shrine has its own festival that is, in many cases, completely unrelated to the festival of the shrine down the road.

Shinto IS a collection of superstitions – the thing is, that DOESN’T make it bad or wrong. Again, it’s just that Japanese religion DOESN’T fit our conceptions of what religion is or ought to be, and therefore “superstition,” as negative as it seems, is the closest word we have for describing it.

People are downvoting you because they simply don’t understand that our culture lacks the specific concepts of Japanese religion, so we don’t have words to really describe it well. “Superstition” is the best English can do. I mean, I guess…”folk beliefs” is slightly better? But, basically, you are 100% correct.

I mentioned above that Japanese religion is a buffet – free to opt in and free to opt out. Japanese people are almost all “Christian” in the sense that they opt into Christianity for the wedding traditions – they LOVE Christian weddings – but that’s about it. Aside form some Christian symbols (cross necklaces) they have no interest in Christianity.

Japanese people rarely, if ever, define themselves as one religion or another. VERY few people would ever even USE the word Shinto, let alone define themselves as Shinto. And Buddhism is incredibly casual here. So, I mean, by what definition are we saying Japanese people are “Buddhist”? No Japanese person I’ve ever met has said that they are Buddhist. They just don’t bother with that. Are they Buddhist because they go to Buddhist funerals?

Well, then, if that’s the case, why aren’t they all Christians, since they go to Christian weddings? In Japan, these definitions just don’t stick. Most Japanese people are just as Christian as they are Buddhist.

One stumbling block here is the myth that Japan is homogenous. Even ethnically and linguistically, the Japanese themselves are not one, single, unified group. But their culture is intensely syncretic, borrowing from a vast number of Asian and European traditions. Not even Shinto is “pure” – I’ve been to Japan’s most sacred shrine (Ise) and guess what? The architecture there? Thoroughly Indonesian. It’s all borrowed from other parts of Asia. It’s all imported, it’s all mixed, it’s all syncretic. It’s all mixed.

This is the website I was looking at that put Christianity “equal” with Shinto (http://www.japan-guide.com/topic/0002.html). But it is tricky to collect accurate religious data on Japan. I would say Christians account for maybe 1-11% of the population from what I’ve read. So, it’s definitely not a large percentage, and I probably shouldn’t have referred to it as part of the “big” three since Shinto and Buddhism would be the big two, Christianity is just what comes up the most after that for whatever reason.

Minus the syncretic religion thing (something I have to look into more, I think) that’s more or less what I was trying to get across in this article. I was just trying to give a very basic primer on Shinto so people could have a general idea of what it is. This article was mostly for people who had no idea about Shinto in the first place. It’s a primer. And I tried to make it clear in the article that Shinto is very cool about people believing in it piecemeal and being pretty casual about it since they don’t try to convert people, etc. I also mention that Shinto is something you can only really experience while in Japan, definitely a lot longer than while I was there – so that’s why I didn’t go super in depth here and try to make it look like I fully understood something that’s not mine to understand. Like I said, Shinto is ingrained in Japanese culture and I didn’t grow up there or live there long enough to say that I really got the full Shinto experience. This article was meant to just give people a brief overview of what it’s all about without being too long or getting into a whole lot of details. I know there were areas I could have expanded on (and in some cases maybe should have, gauging from some of the responses on here) but I was just trying to represent it at a very high level. Hopefully this helps you understand a bit more where I’m coming from. And thanks for the feedback, it’s always appreciated.

Great to see Okami getting some love, what an amazing game! I’m off to Japan for a month in July for the second time (the first was Tokyo for a week a few years back) and was wondering if it’s expected you take part in the shrine rituals when you visit them. I know that they’re pretty simple and don’t want to come across as some disrespectful tourist!

Thanks for the link. Since your last comment I also checked this wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Japan#Shinto

It shows Shinto at 3% in 2008, and Christianity at 1%–then in 2011, no category for Shinto, but “Other Religions” at 3%, and Christianity at 2%. Other commenters have mentioned this as well, but if you classify people by whether they attend festivals, pray for exams, visit shrines on holidays and throughout the year, many more people would be considered “Shinto.”

In case you’re interested, there is some sign that Christianity may be bigger than previously thought: http://www.wnd.com/2006/03/35319/ Shows a possible 6% total, and up to 7% of young people claiming to be Christians, according to a large-scale Gallup survey. I’ve had no luck getting more info, however, so we’ll have to wait and see if more comes out later.

Yeah, one thing’s for sure – it’s hard to pin down numbers for this sort of thing, haha.

Meiji government thought Japanese society and culture should be like western one, if they want make strong country like western nations. -for example, some scholars claimed Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana should be replaced with Alphabet- So, I think they intended to transform shinto to semi-monotheism.

Thank you for your comment. I hear that in Shintoism ancestors are thought to become kami after death, likely with
powers or personalities that reflect their power or lifestyle. (The last
part is my own supposition.) However, none of this replaces my claim of disconnection and further serves to inform characteristic societal norms. I do not believe the claim that the split is 50-50 in terms of adherence to either Buddhism or Shintoism. I have had gleaned that most festivals and holiday traditions, or life celebrations- if you will, are rooted in Shintoism, local custom, and borrowed customs without any religious relevance, but Buddhism and the roots of these other traditions have all served to create the extensive mythology that include the kami and other stories.

Sounds like *all* religions to me, except some are more organized and strict in the superstitions their believers must follow than others…

i like the picture

I like wrighting books and you sounded like you know alot about the shinto religion. Could you maby send me some more information or even just give me some good wevsites.
My email is jessemma13@gmail.com.
It would be muchly appreciated.