Shinto: Kami, Shrines and a Religion Without a Founder
Shinto has no founder, no scripture and no conversion ceremony, and it still shapes the Japanese year from the first shrine visit in January to the festival that carries a kami through the streets in summer. A guide to kami, shrine layout, torii, visiting etiquette, amulets and fortunes, the long Buddhist entanglement and the 1868 separation, and the rise and fall of State Shinto.
What is Shinto, and how does a religion function without a founder or scripture?
Shinto is the indigenous ritual tradition of Japan, organized around the veneration of kami at shrines, and it operates without a founder, a revealed scripture, a creed or a conversion ceremony. The word is written with two characters read as the way of the kami, borrowed from Chinese, and it turns up in the Nihon Shoki of 720 largely to mark off local practice from Buppo, the Buddhist teaching arriving from the continent. What holds the tradition together is repetition rather than doctrine. A shrine sits in a particular place, its kami is honored on particular dates, and the households of the surrounding parish, the ujiko, inherit responsibility for the building and the festival. Belief is not tested at the gate. A visitor who doubts every part of it and a priest who trained at a Shinto university perform the same bow and the same two claps, and Shinto counts both as participation. Texts exist without working as scripture. What gets recited at a shrine is norito, a formal address spoken by a priest to the kami rather than to an audience, and Book Eight of the Engishiki, compiled in 927, preserves twenty-seven of them. Nothing is read to a congregation, because there is no congregation and no sermon.
Whether Shinto existed as a religion before the modern era is the live argument in the field. The historian Kuroda Toshio contended in a widely cited 1981 essay that kami worship had no independent institutional existence before the Meiji period, that it was absorbed into a Buddhist-dominated system, and that Shinto as a separate religion was largely assembled in the nineteenth century by nativist scholars and state officials. Scholars arguing from the shrine side, Sonoda Minoru among them, answer that the shrine, the festival calendar and the parish relationship survived every doctrinal fashion that passed over them, and that this is continuity enough. Both sides agree on the awkward part. The tidy English word Shinto flattens something that was, for a thousand years, inseparable from Buddhism. It also carries an assumption inherited from Protestant Christianity, that a religion is first of all a set of propositions a person affirms. Applied to Japan, that assumption produces the familiar and misleading gap in which most people tell a survey they have no religion while shrine visits over the first three days of January are counted in the tens of millions.
Does Shinto have a holy book?
Shinto has no holy book in the sense of a revealed text binding on believers. The Kojiki of 712 and the Nihon Shoki of 720 record creation myths and imperial genealogy, the Engishiki of 927 sets out court ritual and preserves the oldest norito prayers, and the Kogoshui of 807 argues one clan's case against a rival. Priests consult all of them as sources of procedure and precedent, never as commandment.
Who founded Shinto?
Nobody founded Shinto. There is no figure comparable to the Buddha, Muhammad or Jesus, and no origin date to celebrate. The tradition owes its modern shape to two groups instead: the Kokugaku scholars of the eighteenth century, above all Motoori Norinaga, who spent more than thirty years annotating the Kojiki, and the Meiji officials after 1868 who reorganized scattered shrines into a single national system with standard procedures.
Can you convert to Shinto?
There is no conversion rite, because there is nothing formal to convert from or to. Affiliation runs through residence. You are the ujiko of the shrine in whose district you live, enrolled by birth and by address rather than by decision, and a household that moves across town acquires a new shrine along with a new postal code. Anyone may take part without joining anything. Priests rarely ask a visitor what they believe.
What are kami, and how do they differ from gods?
Kami are the beings, forces and presences that Shinto honors, and the category is far wider and far less tidy than the English word god. Motoori Norinaga gave the definition still quoted in Japanese scholarship: a kami is anything possessing extraordinary or awe-inspiring power, which includes the deities of heaven and earth, but also emperors, exceptional people, animals, trees, mountains, seas, thunder and, he adds pointedly, evil and strange things. Kami are not omnipotent. They are not omniscient, they did not create the universe out of nothing, and they are not morally uniform. A single kami has aspects: the aramitama, its rough and violent face, and the nigimitama, its gentle and blessing face, and ritual is largely the business of keeping the second one uppermost. Most kami are tied to a place. Amaterasu Omikami, the sun kami from whom the imperial line claims descent, has her principal home at Ise. Inari, associated with rice and now with commerce, has a base at Fushimi in Kyoto. Tenjin is Sugawara no Michizane, a court scholar who died in exile in 903 and was enshrined after a run of fires and deaths in the capital was read as his anger.
The mechanism by which a kami acquires a new shrine explains why Japan has tens of thousands of them. A kami's spirit can be divided without being diminished, a procedure called kanjo, so a new shrine receives a bunrei, a portion of the original, and the parent shrine loses nothing at all. That is how Inari came to be enshrined at tens of thousands of sites and how Hachiman spread from Usa in Kyushu across the country with the warrior class. The second mechanism is pacification. A person who dies angry, wronged or violently can become a goryo, a vengeful spirit, and the remedy is not exorcism but promotion. Build the shrine, make the offerings, hold the festival, and the dangerous dead becomes a protective kami with a job. Ordinary family dead are handled differently again. In the folk model set out by Japanese ethnographers, the individual dead lose their separate identity across a span of memorial years and merge into a collective ancestral presence, though the practice varies by region and most of the memorial work belongs to Buddhism rather than to the shrine. For how that compares with rebirth doctrine elsewhere, see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.
Are kami good or evil?
Kami are neither reliably good nor reliably evil, and Shinto has never resolved the question into doctrine. The same kami who grants a harvest can send the typhoon that flattens it, which is why the tradition distinguishes a rough spirit and a gentle spirit within one deity. Magatsuhi kami, associated with pollution and misfortune, are addressed through purification rather than fought as enemies.
How many kami are there?
The standard Japanese answer is yaoyorozu no kami, eight million kami, and the number is a figure of speech meaning uncountably many rather than a census result. Named kami in the Kojiki run into the hundreds. Everything after that is open. A specific waterfall, a boulder, a village boundary or an old camphor tree can hold a kami without ever acquiring a name or a building.
Can a person become a kami?
People become kami regularly. Several of Japan's best-known shrines exist for no other reason. Sugawara no Michizane became Tenjin, petitioned now by every student sitting an entrance examination, while Tokugawa Ieyasu was enshrined at Nikko under a divine title the year after his death in 1616. Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken are the kami of Meiji Jingu, which opened in Tokyo in 1920, eight years after the emperor died.
How is a Shinto shrine laid out, and what does the torii gate mark?
A Shinto shrine is a sequence rather than a single building, and the torii gate marks the point where ordinary ground becomes the kami's ground. Past the torii runs the sando, the approach path, whose center line, the seichu, is kept clear because it belongs to the kami. Off to one side sits the temizuya, a roofed basin with ladles for rinsing hands and mouth. A pair of komainu, guardian figures usually described as lion-dogs, flank the way in. The path ends at the haiden, the worship hall, where visitors stand at an offering box, and behind that, fenced and normally shut, is the honden, the main sanctuary housing the shintai, the object the kami inhabits. Some shrines have no honden at all. At Omiwa Shrine in Nara the mountain behind the buildings is the sanctuary, and worshippers face the wooded slope directly. Architectural styles are named and distinguishable at a glance: shinmei-zukuri at Ise, plain unpainted cypress under a thatched roof; taisha-zukuri at Izumo, older and heavier; and nagare-zukuri, an asymmetric gabled form, which covers more shrines in Japan than any other style.
The torii is old enough that its etymology is disputed. One reading takes the characters literally as a bird perch, another derives the word from tori-iru, to pass through and enter, and no argument has settled it. Shape varies more than color does. The shinmei type is all straight lines, its lintel plain, round and stopping flush at the uprights. The myojin type curves its top beam upward at both ends and rests it on a second crossbar. Ise uses bare wood, Fushimi vermilion. Stone torii are everywhere, and concrete and steel ones are common enough to pass unnoticed. At Fushimi Inari Taisha the thousands of torii lining the mountain paths are donations, each carrying the donor's name and date on the reverse, so the tunnel that fills every photograph is a byproduct of centuries of accumulated corporate and personal petitions. Behind most shrines lies a chinju no mori, a grove left uncut, which is why aerial photographs of Japanese cities show unexplained patches of old forest. Japan's sacred mountains belong to a much wider pattern, described in Mount Kailash: History, Alignments and Spiritual Significance.
What is inside the honden?
The honden holds the shintai, a physical object the kami is understood to inhabit, not a picture or a likeness of it. Mirrors are the most common, along with swords, jewels, stones and sometimes a name written on paper. It is not a statue. Nor is it for looking at: the shintai stays wrapped and boxed, unseen by visitors and by most of the shrine's own priests.
Why are many torii painted orange?
Vermilion is the traditional pigment, standard at Inari shrines and common elsewhere, and it carries two justifications at once. The color is held to drive off misfortune. The pigment was originally cinnabar, mercury sulfide, which is traditionally credited with protecting the timber against rot and insects, so a practical argument arrives dressed as a spiritual one. Repainting today mostly uses synthetic pigment. Plenty of major shrines decline it anyway: Ise Jingu leaves its wood bare and rebuilds instead of painting, and stone torii are left the color of stone.
What are the animal statues at the entrance?
The paired figures at a shrine entrance are komainu, guardians set there to keep out what should not come in. One has its mouth open and one has it closed, a pairing conventionally explained as the sounds a and un, taken as the first and last of the Sanskrit alphabet, and shared with the guardians at Buddhist temple gates. Inari shrines replace them with seated foxes, which are the kami's messengers rather than the kami itself.
How do you visit a shrine properly, and what is the bow-clap-bow sequence?
The standard sequence at a Shinto shrine is two bows, two claps, a silent prayer and one final bow, performed at the worship hall after washing at the water basin. It starts at the torii: stop, bow once, then walk in along either edge of the path, not down the middle. At the temizuya, take the ladle in your right hand, rinse your left, swap hands and rinse your right, pour water into your cupped left hand to rinse your mouth, spit beside the basin, never into it, then tip the ladle upright so the last of the water runs down the handle and cleans it for the next person. At the haiden, put a coin in the box, ring the bell rope if there is one, bow deeply twice, clap twice with your hands slightly offset, hold them together while you pray, then bow once more. Turn and bow again at the torii on the way out. Two shrines break the pattern loudly enough to be worth knowing: Izumo Taisha in Shimane and Usa Jingu in Oita both use four claps rather than two, and a sign will usually say so.
The two-two-one sequence is more standardized than it is ancient. Clapping before a kami, kashiwade or hakushu, is recorded very early, and a third-century Chinese account of the Wa people of the Japanese islands describes them clapping their hands in place of kneeling, but the counts varied by shrine and by rite for most of Japanese history, and older ritual manuals prescribe longer sequences for the largest ceremonies. What produced today's uniform version was the Meiji reorganization of shrines under central administration, followed by mass tourism and printed etiquette signage at every gate. Shrine explanations read the claps two ways: as an announcement of arrival, letting the kami know that somebody is standing there, and as an expression of gratitude, which is why a version of the same gesture closes Japanese business meetings and political rallies. Convention holds that you open a prayer by giving your name and address, thank the kami before asking for anything, and keep all of it silent. There is no wording to learn.
Which side of the shrine path should you walk on?
Walk along either edge of the sando and leave the middle clear, since the center line, the seichu, belongs to the kami. Most visitors follow this loosely. Priests do not: they step aside, and they bow whenever duty makes them cross the line. Where a torii is narrow, pass through beside one upright instead of straight down the center of the opening.
Do you really have to rinse your mouth at the water basin?
Rinsing the mouth belongs to the full temizu, but the ladle never touches your lips: the water goes into your cupped hand first, and you spit onto the stones beside the basin, not back into it. Many shrines closed or rebuilt their basins during the coronavirus years, replacing communal ladles with running bamboo spouts or filling them with flowers. Washing hands alone is accepted everywhere now.
What should you say during the prayer?
Nothing out loud. Shrine prayer is silent, and there is no liturgy for a visitor to memorize. The usual convention is to state your name and where you live, express thanks first, then make one specific request instead of reciting a list. Priests do recite norito on behalf of petitioners at formal ceremonies, but that is a professional job requiring training, not something visitors attempt.
What are omamori, ema, omikuji and shimenawa for?
Omamori are protective amulets, ema are wooden plaques for written petitions, omikuji are paper fortunes drawn at random, and shimenawa are twisted straw ropes marking something as sacred. An omamori is a small brocade bag holding a consecrated slip, obtained at the shrine office and carried in a bag, a car or a pocket, and they come specialized: kotsu anzen for road safety, gakugyo joju for passing examinations, enmusubi for finding a partner, anzan for a safe birth, yakuyoke for warding off a bad year. Ema are palm-sized wooden boards, usually painted with the shrine's kami, its animal or the zodiac sign of the year, on which visitors write a wish and hang the board on a rack where the kami can read it. Omikuji are strips of paper drawn from a box or shaken out of a numbered cylinder, ranked from daikichi, great blessing, down through several middle grades to kyo and daikyo, curse and great curse. Shimenawa are ropes of rice straw, fringed with folded paper zigzags called shide, and they draw a line: across a torii, around a tree, along the front of a building or around a rock.
These objects are also how most shrines pay their bills, and the vocabulary around them is careful. A shrine does not sell an omamori and a visitor does not buy one. The word is juyo or hatsuyo, receiving, and the money is hatsuho-ryo, a first-fruits offering, a term inherited from the days when what changed hands was new rice. Shrine income comes from these items, from ujiko subscriptions, from weddings, from ground-breaking ceremonies for new buildings, and from blessing new cars in a dedicated bay beside the hall. Ema have a traceable history. Wealthy petitioners once donated live horses, horses being a fitting gift for a kami, and less wealthy ones substituted a picture of a horse painted on wood, which is exactly what the name says. At Kitano Tenmangu in Kyoto, dedicated to the scholar Tenjin, the racks fill each winter with plaques naming specific universities and entrance examinations.
Can you open an omamori?
Do not open it. The consecrated slip inside, usually paper or thin wood inscribed with the kami's name, is the actual amulet, and the sewn bag exists to keep it intact and unread. Shrines are consistent on this point, and the folk explanation is blunt: opening the bag lets the protection out. There is no ceremony for inspecting the contents, because nobody is meant to.
What do the omikuji rankings mean?
Omikuji rank fortunes from daikichi, great blessing, down to daikyo, great curse, with several middle grades whose order differs from shrine to shrine, so a chukichi at one shrine may outrank a shokichi at another. The text below the ranking matters more than the label, giving separate readings for health, travel, business, study, lost objects and a future partner. Bad fortunes are traditionally tied to a rack on the way out.
What is the straw rope with paper zigzags?
That is a shimenawa, a rope of twisted rice straw hung with folded paper streamers called shide, and it marks a boundary. Inside it, the ground or the object is sacred. They run from a thin cord around a roadside stone up to the one at the Kagura hall of Izumo Taisha, some thirteen meters of braided straw weighing several tons. A yokozuna, sumo's top rank, wears one. For purification carried into the home, see Smudging and Space Clearing: Practices, Ethics and Alternatives.
Which festivals and life events does the Shinto year revolve around?
The Shinto year turns on a small number of fixed national observances and a very large number of purely local ones. Hatsumode, the first shrine visit of the new year, is the biggest by far, drawing tens of millions of people between January 1 and 3, with Meiji Jingu in Tokyo taking the largest crowds in the country. Setsubun, which lands on February 3 in most years but moved to February 2 in 2021 and again in 2025, marks the seasonal turn with mamemaki, roasted soybeans thrown while shouting demons out, fortune in. Kinensai on February 17 asks for the coming harvest and Niiname-sai on November 23 gives thanks for it, the second surviving in the civil calendar as a national holiday. Twice a year, on June 30 and December 31, shrines hold oharae, a great purification, and the summer one sends visitors walking through a large ring of woven grass. Everything else is local. A parish festival transfers the kami into a mikoshi, a portable shrine, which teams then carry through the neighborhood, so the shrine's territory gets walked and re-marked once a year. The famous ones are old and specific: Aoi Matsuri at the Kamo shrines in Kyoto on May 15, and Gion Matsuri through July at Yasaka Shrine, which began in 869 as a rite to quiet the spirits blamed for an epidemic.
The life-event calendar is where most Japanese people meet Shinto without calling it religion. A newborn is taken to the local shrine about a month after birth for hatsumiyamairi and formally presented to the kami. On November 15, children aged three, five and seven are dressed up for shichi-go-san, a holdover from an era when surviving to those ages was worth marking publicly. Yakudoshi, the unlucky years, bring adults back for warding rites, traditionally at forty-two for men and thirty-three for women under the old counting system. Weddings held before a shrine altar, with the three-times-three sake exchange called sansankudo, are a surprisingly recent format, popularized after the 1900 wedding of the future Emperor Taisho and offered commercially in Tokyo shortly afterward. Funerals are the gap in all this. Shinto rites for the dead exist but stay rare, so the two traditions divide a Japanese life close to cleanly between them: the shrine takes the beginning and the temple takes the end.
Why are Japanese funerals almost always Buddhist?
Death counts as kegare, a pollution kept away from shrines, so the funeral trade went to Buddhist temples, and the division hardened under the Tokugawa danka system that required every household to register with one. Shinto funerals, sosai, do exist, conducted at homes or rented halls rather than at shrines, but they remain a small minority. Bereaved families traditionally avoid shrine visits for a mourning period of roughly fifty days.
What actually happens at hatsumode?
Hatsumode is a long queue, a short prayer and a set of purchases. Visitors line up at the worship hall, make the standard bow-clap-bow, draw an omikuji for the year ahead, return last year's amulets to a collection box for burning, and pick up new ones, often with a hamaya, a decorated arrow said to turn away misfortune. Food stalls line the approach path. Many people go at midnight on January 1.
What is a mikoshi and why is it shaken?
A mikoshi is a portable shrine, a lacquered and gilded miniature building mounted on carrying poles, into which the kami is ritually transferred for the length of a festival. Teams carry it through the parish at a jog, shouting in rhythm, and deliberately jolt and rock it as they go. The usual explanation is that the violent movement rouses the kami's energy rather than insulting it.
How did Shinto and Buddhism merge, and why were they forcibly separated in 1868?
Shinto and Buddhism spent roughly a thousand years as a single religious system, and the Meiji government pulled them apart by decree in 1868. Buddhism reached Japan in the sixth century and, rather than displacing kami worship, absorbed it. From the eighth century onward, small temples went up inside shrine precincts, jingu-ji, where Buddhist monks read sutras for the benefit of the local kami, who were treated as powerful but unenlightened beings still in need of the dharma. By the eleventh century the relationship had inverted into honji suijaku theory: each kami was the local trace, suijaku, of a buddha or bodhisattva who was its original ground, honji. Amaterasu was identified with Dainichi Nyorai, Hachiman was given the title Great Bodhisattva, and combined figures called gongen, provisional manifestations, were worshipped at mountain sites like Kumano and Nikko. Then in 1868 the new Meiji government issued the shinbutsu bunri orders, separating kami and buddhas by law. Buddhist statues, sutras, bells and priests were removed from shrine grounds, shrine monks were ordered to laicize or leave the premises, and buildings were reassigned, sold or pulled down.
The separation orders did not call for destroying Buddhism, but they released something that did. Haibutsu kishaku, abolish the buddhas and destroy Shakyamuni, was the slogan of several years of iconoclasm in which temple statues were smashed or melted for their metal, sutras were burned and temple lands were seized, with the intensity depending almost entirely on the attitude of the local domain. Totals for temples closed vary enormously between accounts and rest on incomplete prefectural records, so any single number deserves suspicion. The motive was political. Meiji legitimacy rested on the emperor's descent from Amaterasu, which called for a purified national cult free of foreign accretion, an idea the government inherited from the Kokugaku scholars. There was a precedent. Yoshida Kanetomo, who died in 1511, had already argued the reverse of honji suijaku, making the kami original and the buddhas their derivative traces. Buddhism recovered institutionally within a generation, but the two traditions have stayed administratively separate ever since.
What is honji suijaku?
Honji suijaku is the medieval theory that Japanese kami are local manifestations of Indian buddhas and bodhisattvas. The buddha is the honji, the original ground, and the kami is the suijaku, the trace it leaves in one particular place. The scheme allowed a single site to be both shrine and temple without contradiction, and it governed how Japanese religion was organized and explained for roughly seven hundred years.
What was haibutsu kishaku?
Haibutsu kishaku was the wave of anti-Buddhist destruction that followed the 1868 separation edicts, concentrated in the first years of Meiji rule. Temples lost land, images were destroyed or sold abroad, and bronze fittings were melted down, with Satsuma and a handful of other domains going much further than the rest. It was never official policy, which is a large part of why it was so uneven.
Why do some shrines still look Buddhist?
Separation was carried out unevenly. Some shrines kept their pagodas, guardian statues and temple-style gates simply because the local official in charge had no appetite for demolition. A few sites changed category outright: Kotohira-gu in Shikoku was reorganized from a temple complex into a shrine, and its Buddhist inheritance is still legible in the layout. Shugendo mountain centers, whose mixed practice was banned in 1872, carried hybrid features through the ban and out the far side.
What was State Shinto, and how does Shinto function in Japan today?
State Shinto is the name for the arrangement, running from the 1870s to 1945, under which the Japanese state administered shrines as public institutions of national ritual while officially maintaining that they were not religion. The maneuver mattered legally. The Meiji Constitution of 1889 guaranteed freedom of religion, so classifying shrine rites as civic ceremony let the government require attendance from schoolchildren, soldiers and colonial subjects without conceding a violation. Shrines were ranked in a national hierarchy from 1871, priests at the upper ranks became state appointees, and shrines were built across the empire, in Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria, where local populations were pressed to worship at them. Popular religious movements that would not fit the scheme were licensed separately as Sect Shinto, thirteen recognized groups including Tenrikyo and Konkokyo. The system ended abruptly. On December 15, 1945 the occupation authorities issued the Shinto Directive, ordering the state to stop funding, sponsoring and propagating Shinto, and the 1947 Constitution barred public money from religious institutions. Shrines reorganized as private religious bodies, and most joined a new umbrella organization, Jinja Honcho, formed in February 1946.
Shinto today is large on paper and thin on the ground. Jinja Honcho oversees roughly eighty thousand shrines and counts around twenty thousand priests, a ratio it acknowledges on its own website, so one kannushi routinely covers more than one shrine and many rural sites with aged and emptied parishes have no resident priest at all. Priests train mainly at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo or Kogakkan University in Ise. The political sore point is Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Japan's war dead and, since October 1978, fourteen men charged as Class A war criminals at the Tokyo trials, eleven of them convicted on that charge, one on a lesser one and two dead before judgment. Visits by serving prime ministers draw formal protests from China and South Korea and lawsuits at home. Japanese courts have drawn the line between state and religion case by case: in 1977 the Supreme Court allowed a city to pay for a Shinto ground-breaking ceremony on the grounds that it had become secular custom, while in 1997 the same court held that Ehime prefecture's offerings to Yasukuni were unconstitutional. Several prominent shrines, Yasukuni and Fushimi Inari Taisha among them, sit outside Jinja Honcho entirely.
Was the Japanese emperor considered a god?
The wartime title was arahitogami, a kami in human form, which is a different claim from a creator god in the monotheist sense, and Japanese scholars still argue about how literally it was ever taken. On January 1, 1946, Emperor Hirohito issued a rescript rejecting the idea that the emperor was divine and that the Japanese were a superior people. Occupation officials had a hand in drafting it.
Who runs Shinto shrines now?
Shrines are private religious corporations under Japanese law, run by their own priests with lay parish organizations. Most affiliate with Jinja Honcho, the Association of Shinto Shrines, formed in 1946, which certifies priests, distributes the Ise talismans and issues guidance rather than doctrine. There is no pope. Jinja Honcho cannot define belief, and a shrine that dislikes its politics can leave, as several have.
Are there Shinto shrines outside Japan?
A small number of full shrines operate abroad, serving Japanese emigrant communities first and local interest second. Hawaii has the longest continuous history: the Izumo Taishakyo Mission in downtown Honolulu, a branch of Izumo Taisha, dates to 1906 and still holds regular rites. The mainland record is thinner and less settled. Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America, a branch of a shrine in Mie prefecture, ran at Granite Falls in Washington State from 2001 until its priest closed it in 2023, and its enshrined kami were transferred to a site near Victoria in British Columbia. The numbers stay tiny either way.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you be Shinto and Buddhist at the same time?
Yes, and the combination is ordinary rather than awkward. The traditional arrangement puts a kamidana, a small shelf shrine for kami, and a butsudan, a Buddhist altar for the family dead, in the same house, though household surveys find the butsudan somewhat commoner than the kamidana and both of them scarcer in city apartments than in older rural houses. Shinto handles birth, weddings, new years and new buildings. Buddhism handles funerals and memorial services. Neither tradition asks for exclusive membership or a statement of faith, which is why the adherent totals reported by shrines and temples together add up to considerably more than the population of Japan.
Is Shinto a religion or just Japanese culture?
Shinto is a religion under Japanese law, where shrines register as religious corporations, and in the academic study of religion. The confusion has a specific source. From the 1880s the state insisted that shrine rites were civic ceremony rather than religion, precisely so that attendance could be made compulsory without breaching the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. That doctrine was abolished in 1945, but the habit of calling shrine visits custom rather than faith outlived it, and many Japanese people still describe themselves that way.
What is the difference between a Shinto shrine and a Buddhist temple?
A shrine houses a kami and a temple houses buddhas. The quickest tells are at the entrance: shrines have a torii and a pair of komainu, while temples have a roofed gate, often with muscular Nio guardians, and frequently a graveyard, which shrines almost never have. You clap at a shrine and never at a temple, where you bow with your palms pressed together in silence. Names help too. Shrines end in jinja, jingu, taisha or gu, temples in ji, dera or in.
How much money are you supposed to put in the offering box?
There is no required amount and nobody is checking. The traditional choice is a five-yen coin, because the words for five yen sound like the word for a karmic tie or connection, and plenty of people use one regardless of what they could afford to give. Larger sums go into an envelope handed in at the shrine office for a formal request, not into the box. Drop the coin rather than hurling it, and bow before and after.
What do you do with an omamori once the year is over?
Return it to a shrine, ideally the one that issued it. A collection box near the entrance takes old amulets for ritual burning, often at a mid-January fire called dondo-yaki. An omamori is conventionally good for a year, or until the need it covers has passed. Do not put one in the household trash, and do not hand a shrine amulet in at a Buddhist temple, since the two keep separate collections and separate fires.
Is it disrespectful to take photos at a shrine?
Photographing the grounds, the torii and the approach path is normally fine, and shrines that object post signs saying so. What is usually off limits is shooting into the worship hall or the sanctuary, photographing ceremonies, weddings and priests at work without asking, and using flash or a tripod in a crowd. Ise Jingu restricts photography near its inner precincts. If people are praying, wait for them. The building is in use, not a film set.
Can a foreigner or a non-believer pray at a Shinto shrine?
Yes. Shrines are open to anyone, no membership or profession of belief is required, and no priest will ask about your religion at the gate. What is expected is procedure: wash at the water basin, keep off the center of the path, follow the bow-clap-bow sequence and stay quiet near the worship hall. Visitors from other faiths often bow without clapping, and that passes without comment. The one traditional restriction concerns recent bereavement in your own family.
Try Our Free Tools
Related topics: shinto, shinto beliefs, kami shinto, shinto shrines, japanese shinto religion, shinto practices, torii gate meaning
