What is Shinto Religion and what does it believe in?

This is a Torii gate. One of the most recognisable symbols of Japan alongside the cherry blossom, and this electric mouse. Torii are also a sacred gateway in Shintoism, the indigenous religious practice of Japan. Even with an over 2000 year history Shinto has never been easy to define, the word Shinto wasn’t even used much until the seventeenth century.

But Shinto has its own shrines, priests, gods and rituals. Everything you'd expect from a religion but today while over 80% of Japanese people participate in Shinto practices only 3-4% identify themselves as believers in Shinto and many Japanese people practice Shinto alongside Buddhism without any sense of contradiction.

So what is Shinto? Why are Sumo wrestlers so salty? And what can the god of hair do for you? Well, let's find out. In the beginning there was nothing but formless chaos. Over eons the lighter particles of this chaos rose and became heaven and the heavier ones fell and formed the Earth which was a muddy ocean.

Between these realms three heavenly beings or kami formed. They were followed by 7 more generations of kami. The seventh generation of these kami were a man and woman pair known as Izanagi and Izanami. Who descended down to give form to the Earth.Izanagi and Izanami took a heavenly spear and stirred up the ocean below which created an island, the first land. Izanagi and Izanami decided to live on this island and quickly felt the need to have children.

So they got down to making babies the old fashioned way, by...erecting a large ceremonial pillar and performing a marriage ritual, by walking around the pillar in opposite direction and when they met on the other side Izanami greeted Izanagi first which resulted in the birth of a boneless and limbless child, who they quickly put on a boat and push off into the sea but don’t worry he turns out mostly fine, he grows some bones, becomes the kami of luck & fishermen, and even has his own beer now.

They gave the ritual another go with Izanagi speaking first and from this union the islands of Japan were born along with more Kami such as the Kami of wind, mountains, and grass. Finally, Izanami gave birth to the god of fire and died because, well, she had just given birth to a baby made out of fire. Izanagi killed the baby in grief, cutting him into pieces which became the volcanoes of Japan and other kami like the dragon Watatsumi and the storm god and first sumo wrestler Takemikazuchi.

Also at this point there was some ehhh human waste around and from that some more kami were born like the clay kami couple Haniyasu-hiko and Haniyasu-hime. An obviously sad and lonely Izanagi wanted to see Izanami again and descended to Yomi, the gloomy polluted underworld. He found Izanami down in that dark place and when he shone a light on her he saw that his wife was
a decaying rotting creature.

Izanagi bolted Which enraged Izanami who sent an army of demons after him. As he escaped the underworld he sealed the door with a giant boulder, protecting the living world from the world of death. The furious Izanami cursed him and promised to kill a thousand people a day.

Izanagi promised to make sure that one thousand five hundred people would be born every day. Izanagi, covered in the pollution from the underworld, wanted to purify himself. So, he found a river to perform misogi, or purification. As he washed kami were born from the clothes he took off and from each part of his body that he washed. Finally, he washed his face. When he did this, he created the most important kami called the three precious children. From washing his left eye came Amaterasu Omikami, kami of the sun.

From washing his right eye came Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, kami of the moon and from washing his nose came Susanoo-no-mikoto, kami of storms. This is a simplified version of the Japanese creation story as told in the oldest surviving texts of Japanese history and myth, the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, written in the eighth-century.

This story introduces us to some of the most important aspects of Shinto such as Kami and Purification. We don’t know much about Shinto’s origins. Shinto has no founders, like the Buddha, no prophets, like Muhammad, or holy books like, the Bible, to tell us about how it started. But archaeological evidence suggests that practices which could be called Shinto, like the worship of nature spirits in sacred spaces, first appeared in Japan in the Yayoi period around between 300 BCE-300 CE.

The word Shinto comes from these two Chinese characters. Shen which means ‘god’ or ‘spirit’, the native Japanese word for which is kami and this character Dao which means ‘way’. This Dao or Way is the same as the one in Daoism and tells us a lot about Shinto, it is a Way of life, a practice more concerned with rituals and community than with belief, faith, or moral codes.

Literally Shinto is the Way of the Gods, or, for the Japanese, the Way of the Kami. But what exactly is a Kami, well. Kami To put it simply, Shinto IS the worship of kami. The typical translation of kami into English is god or deity, but that's not a great translation. Kami can be spirits of the landscape, forces of nature, and the spirits of dead ancestors.

Anything in this world that fills you with a sense of wonder or awe can be a Kami. It isn’t difficult to see how the ancient Japanese, living in a wondrous world of massive live volcanoes, surging rivers, powerful waterfalls, and vast forests, felt that they lived in a world that was fully alive and aware and inhabited by kami. In Shinto the physical world itself is sacred, worthy of respect, and you can have a relationship with it.

So Kami can be god-like such as the sun goddess Amaterasu but the concept extends to other natural phenomena like mountains, rain, foxes, and earthquakes. Smallpox has a kami and so does fertility, growth, rice, and even hair has its own humble kami. In Shinto there is no one all-powerful god and instead the universe is watched over by the harmonious cooperation of the kami who live in this world alongside humans and generally want them to be happy and prosperous.

It’s a cycle of reciprocity, humans respect the kami and the kami take care of them. Kami are expressions of Musubi which is the creative energy of the universe and also a kind of spam based sushi. But the spiritual non-spam based Musubi literally means ‘to unite’ it ties everyone and everything in the universe together and so everything is interconnected, the landscape, nature, the Kami, and humans.

Everything is considered to be always growing in the process of creation. Kami are not all-powerful or all-knowing and are invisible and immaterial, but they can live inside certain objects in shrines. Kami can have personalities, can be beneficial or malevolent, and you can interact with them. This communication comes in the form of prayer and offering sacrifices such as food. The Japanese worship of Kami is a way to maintain a sacred relationship with their surroundings.

While some Kami like Inari the Kami of rice are worshipped across Japan, many Kami are deeply local, like the kami of a specific village, family, or waterfall, like the Kami of Nachi Falls. A single tree might even have a kami. For example when the Kayashima Railway Station needed to expand, locals protested against chopping down a tree because it housed a kami and so the station had to be built around it.

Failing to perform the correct rituals or disrespecting kami can lead to punishment called shinbatsu, usually in the form of illness. Most Kami are good but some kami, like magatsuhi-no-kami the Kami of disaster, are essentially destructive and cause misfortune but Naobi-no-kami, the kami of...un-disaster? Is tasked with cleaning up after Magatsuhi-no-kami’s destruction.

There are also the Yōkai, weird and wonderful mischievous monsters that pop up in Japanese mythology, these can range from terrifying soul-devouring demons down to the Tōfu-kozō, a baby with a massive head that follows you around constantly offering you tofu. There are said to be eight million kami, which is just the Japanese way of saying an uncountable amount.

Certain important humans can be considered kami both before and after death. Like Tenjin, a 10th century scholar who was so smart he became kami of academics after dying and who worried students will pray to for luck in passing exams. Or like the Emperor of Japan who from the Meiji period was considered a living kami until renouncing his divinity after Japan's surrender in the Second World War.

Purity If anything can be called the central ritual of Shinto it is purification, referred to in general as harae . The purpose of purification is to remove spiritual pollution, which is called tsumi or kegare. This pollution is anything that separates someone from the creative musubi nature of all kami. Kegare pollutters involve things like death, disease, filth, and blood while tsumi involves actions like crime, murder, and disrespecting your parents, and not smickity smashing the likity like button.

Pollution is only temporary in Shinto and humans are not considered naturally impure. So it’s not like sin in other religions. Shinto doesn’t actually preach many ethics and it has no reward based heaven or punishment based hell. In Shinto nature is inherently good and impurity is an abnormality that can be cleansed with a ritual. Impurity must be removed before interacting with a kami in rituals or prayer.

That’s why at the entrance to almost all Shinto shrines you’ll see a tank of water with wooden ladles. People use this to perform a form of Harae called Temizu. You wash your left hand, then right, then pour water into your hand and use that to rinse your mouth. Don’t drink from the ladle and for the love of Amaterasu don’t spit the water back into the basin, spit it on the floor! More extreme forms of Harae are called misogi.

Misogi includes bathing in the ocean or even standing under a waterfall. Harae can also be performed with salt, in which case it is called shubatsu. You can see this purification at the beginning of a sumo match when salt is spread around the ring to keep out impurity. One other form of purification ritual involves waving a wand, the haraigushi, over the thing being purified like a person or even a new car, or over a plot of land before construction begins to purify it and bring good fortune.

Shrines The most recognizable aspect of Shinto is its shrines. There are over 100,000 shrines in Japan today from the Grand Shrine at Ise where the sun kami Amaterasu-Omikami is worshipped as the ancestor of the Imperial family to the humble Mikami jinja in Kyoto, the only shrine for the worship of kamigami, the kami of hair.

At this shrine you’ll hear the prayers of those wishing for a cure from baldness. This hair kami was actually a man once called Masayuki Fujiwara, he was such a spectacular hairdresser that he became the kami of hair after his death. A shrine can be any place where a kami lives and interacts with humans, so a shrine can be architectural masterpieces like the Grand Shrine at Ise or simple road-side shrines, forest shrines, or household shrines.

Kami aren’t bound to just one shrine and can be enshrined in a number of different places. At the heart of a Shinto shrine is the go-shintai, an object that a kami lives in but the object is not the kami itself. It is typically a ritual object like mirrors, swords, and jewels although one go-shintai at a shrine in Yokohama is an industrial robot.

They can also be trees, rocks, or even a mountain, like Mt. Miwa which is the go-shintai of the rain kami Ōmononushi. Shinto Shrines are taken care of by Shinto priests known as Kannushi. A Shinto shrine is traditionally surrounded by forests, parks, or mountains, which today provide large green spaces in modern Japanese cities. The most important building inside a Shrine is the honden, or main hall, which contains the go-shintai and is closed to the public. In front of the honden is the haiden, or hall of worship where the public can worship and participate in rituals.

A shrine also generally has torii gates marking the entrance between the sacred area of the shrine and the secular outside world. You bow before a Torii gate before entering to show respect to the Kami. The most famous torii are the numerous torii gates at Fushimi Inari-taisha, the main shrine of the rice kami, Inari. You only have to bow at the first Torii gate otherwise you’d never reach the shrine.

A shrine may be missing any of these features though. For example, Omiwa Jinja at Mt Miwa has no honden since the mountain itself is the go-shintai. This is the most ancient form of shrine, built to worship the natural world itself. At a shrine you may see a rock or tree or even the shrine itself surrounded by a ritual rope called a shimenawa. The shimenawa encircles sacred space, keeps it pure, and wards off evil spirits.

A shimenawa is worn by sumo wrestlers of the highest rank as they are considered to be yorishiro, a vessel capable of housing a kami and becoming a go-shintai. Shinto shrines are all accepting and so anyone can visit. When visiting a shrine, you first walk through the torii gate. Then you proceed to the chozubachi to do the Temizu purification of the hands and mouth. To worship the kami, you throw a coin, usually a 5-yen coin, into the offering box. Then you bow twice, then clap twice and say your prayer followed by another bow to thank the kami.

After your prayer you can purchase an amulet or a charm for good luck, or even an Omikuji, a piece of paper that is a kind of fortune lottery that contains good or bad fortunes concerning things such as health, business, and marriage. You’ll see left-over ones hanging from trees at the shrines as people will leave behind Omikuji with bad predictions as a way to leave the fortune in the hands of the kami.

Festivals Shrines are also the centers of matsuri or festivals. At Matsuri you might see purifications, prayers and food offerings called shinsen, and cheerful community activities like the mikoshi where the kami is literally carried around the community, sometimes even being carried into the ocean in an act of purification.

You might also see contests like sumo, horse archery and traditional performances such as kagura dance or noh theatre. One large Matsuri is the Hatsumōde, The ‘first visit’ to a Shinto or Buddhist shrine on Japanese New Year, typically January 1–3. It is estimated that up to 80% of Japanese people take part in this festival. Some people travel through the night in order to be at the shrine as new year begins or to view the sunrise from a mountain-top shrine. Festival goers enjoy the trip with friends and family, eat seasonal foods, drink sake, and return old amulets for ritual burning and buy new ones for the new year.

A much smaller but equally interesting festival is the Nakizumō or Crying Sumo Festival, held in May where two giant sumo wrestlers rock babies in their arms, the winner being the one whose baby cries first. The babies receive blessings for good-health and fortune. For most of its history Japan has been an archipelago of belief with heavy influence from East Asia.

One of the largest impacts of Chinese influence was the introduction of Buddhism to Japan around the 6th century. Buddhism and Shinto essentially fused together over the thousand years after Buddhism entered Japan. In a process called shinbutshu-shugo, Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples were normally built alongside each other.

Kami were taken up into the Buddhist worldview and Buddhas were considered kami. This mixture of Japanese belief and general East Asian beliefs can be seen in this statement from the Edo Period “It is each man’s duty to believe in the kami, the Buddha, and follow the teachings of Confucius.” For the majority of its history Shinto was not an organised religion and was instead the folk religion of Japan that was practiced with great diversity across the islands alongside Buddhism and other beliefs.

Starting in the seventeenth century, some thinkers began to want to go back to a hypothetical ‘pure’ Japanese culture. They referred to this study of ‘Japaneseness’ as kokugaku, or national studies. The kokugaku scholars wanted to try to remove all non-Japanese influence from Japanese culture.

In the mid nineteenth-century the emperor Meiji took control of Japan. Meiji wanted to create a modern nation-state with all the fancy things Western nations were developing at the time, like nationalism and colonial empires. He liked the ideas of the kokugaku scholars and wanted to create a culturally united and pure Japanese Japan.

Shinto became a nationalistic tool. Up until this period Shinto wasn’t understood as a religion. The word Shinto kind of just meant Japanese religious practices that weren’t Buddhist. These nationalistic reforms banned the combinations of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Meiji also created the Shrine Bureau, which nationalised the hundreds of thousands of community managed shrines and brought them under the control of the state. Shinto practice was then directed towards the worship of the imperial family, which was seen as the divine descendants of the sun goddess Amaterasu and with the Emperor being a living kami.

This State Shinto became the belief system in Japan during the first half of the twentieth century and became a key aspect of the nationalist and imperialist direction that Japan went in before and during the second world war and so remains controversial up until today. After the war, the emperor was forced to renounce his divine nature, that he was not a living kami.

Which he kind of did, it’s complicated. Another part of this was to sever the connection between the state and the shrines. Shinto was formally separate from the state and from state funding and now the non governmental Association of Shinto Shrines oversees Shinto Shrines. Today over 80% of Japanese people participate in Shinto rituals. But the majority say that they belong to no particular religion.

The common saying within the religious landscape of Japan is ‘Shinto weddings, Buddhist funerals’, even after Meiji’s attempt to separate them Buddhism and Shinto in Japan remain intertwined in everyday life. Except in the case of priests, most Japanese people practice both Shinto and Buddhism. Shinto rituals tend to be centered around this world and life events and finding ways to respectfully live with the kami and with other human beings.

People go to a Shinto shrine after the birth of a child, or at a wedding, or for success in studies or business. Over time Buddhism took over the afterlife aspect of religion, and today funerals and memorials are generally Buddhist. Japanese people easily combine Shinto and Buddhism in their daily lives. Shinto is still a practice that offers a way for people to connect with the environment around them and perform respectful rituals towards nature, family, and their community.

Shinto pops up across Japanese culture from respect for dead ancestors, to Pokemon, to Studio Ghibli films, and to the nation’s relationship with nature. In Japan Shinto is more than a religion. It is a way of life, a part of the country and its people. Something about the gorgeous landscape of Japan brings about a sense of awe and wonder, something that really hit me when I was watching Hidden Japan over on Curiositystream.

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