Shinto

Shinto has no founder and no founding date. It grew out of the ancient worship of the kamikami The gods or sacred powers of Shinto, present in nature, ancestors and great people. Glossary, the sacred powers of the Japanese islands: spirits of mountains, rivers and trees, ancestors of clans, and great deities such as the sun goddess Amaterasu. The name Shinto, “the way of the kami”, came into use later, to distinguish native worship from Buddhism, which reached Japan in the 6th century.

In the 7th and 8th centuries the imperial court organised the worship of the kami. It built up the shrine of Amaterasu at Ise and commissioned the Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720), which tell how the gods created Japan and how the imperial family descended from Amaterasu.

For more than a thousand years Shinto and Buddhism were closely intertwined: kami were seen as local forms of buddhas, and shrines and temples often shared grounds and priests. In 1868 the Meiji government separated them by law and built up State Shinto around the emperor, which was abolished after 1945. Today shrines are private religious bodies.

The worship of the kami took institutional shape when the Japanese court modelled its state on Tang China. The Taiho Code of 701 created the Jingikan, the Council of Kami Affairs, which oversaw rites for the whole realm and sent offerings to officially listed shrines. By tradition, the custom of rebuilding the Ise shrine every twenty years began in 690, under Empress Jito. The Engishiki of 927 registered nearly 3,000 shrines entitled to state offerings, a map of kami worship that still shapes Japan’s religious landscape.

From the 8th century the kami were drawn into the world of Buddhism. Temples were built within shrine grounds, and the war god Hachiman was said to have pledged his support for the casting of the Great Buddha at Nara. In the Heian period the theory of honji suijaku explained the kami as local “traces” of buddhas and bodhisattvas; Amaterasu, for example, was linked with the cosmic Buddha Vairocana. Buddhist schools developed their own interpretations, such as Ryobu Shinto in the Shingon school and Sanno Shinto on Mount Hiei. For most people, worshipping kami and buddhas together was simply the normal shape of religion.

In the medieval period some priests began to assert the independence of the kami. Priests of the Outer Shrine at Ise developed Watarai or Ise Shinto in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281, both defeated with the help of storms remembered as kamikaze, “divine winds”, strengthened the idea of Japan as a land protected by the gods, and Kitabatake Chikafusa’s chronicle of 1339 opened by calling Japan “the divine land”. In the late 15th century Yoshida Kanetomo founded Yoshida Shinto, which claimed that the kami were the root of which Buddhism was only the flower; his family came to license shrine priests across the country.

During the peaceful Edo period (1603–1868) Confucian scholars blended Shinto with Neo-Confucian ethics, while millions of ordinary people made pilgrimages to Ise, sometimes in sudden mass movements. The school of “national learning”, kokugaku, sought a Japanese spirit free of Chinese influence. Its greatest scholar, Motoori Norinaga, completed a vast commentary on the Kojiki in 1798, and his follower Hirata Atsutane gave the movement a fervent religious and political edge. New religious movements also arose from popular devotion, among them Kurozumikyo (1814) and Tenrikyo (1838), later classed as Sect Shinto.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 transformed Shinto. The new government ordered the separation of kami and buddhas, and in places the order unleashed attacks on Buddhist temples and images. Shrines were ranked, their priests appointed by the state, and in 1869 the shrine later named Yasukuni was founded in Tokyo to honour those who died for the emperor. Officially, shrine rites were declared civic duties rather than religion, which allowed the state to require them while the 1889 constitution promised freedom of belief. This system, called State Shinto by historians, taught loyalty to the emperor as a descendant of Amaterasu and was extended to Japan’s colonies; scholars still debate how far it reached into ordinary religious life.

After Japan’s defeat, the Allied occupation issued the Shinto Directive on 15 December 1945, ending state support for shrines, and on 1 January 1946 the emperor publicly denied that he was a living god. Shrines regrouped as private bodies under the Association of Shinto Shrines, founded in 1946, and the 1947 constitution separated religion and state. Since then official visits to Yasukuni have caused controversy in Japan and with its neighbours, while the twentieth-yearly rebuilding of Ise, most recently in 2013, continues a rite more than thirteen centuries old.

Shinto is less a set of doctrines than a way of living in relationship with the kami. The kami are present in the beauty and power of nature, in places and objects, and in ancestors; human beings live among them and owe them respect and gratitude.

The central value is purity. Impurity (kegarekegare Impurity or pollution, which purification removes. Glossary), caused by death, disease or wrongdoing, disturbs the harmony between people and kami, and it is removed by purification (haraeharae Purification rites that remove impurity, central to Shinto worship. Glossary) rather than by repentance for sin. Sincerity of heart (makotomakoto Sincerity, a sincere and pure heart, prized in Shinto ethics. Glossary) and harmony with family, community and nature are prized.

Shinto has little to say about the afterlife; that has traditionally been left to Buddhism. Its focus is this world: life, fertility, the seasons and the well-being of the community.

Most Shinto worship takes place at shrines, of which Japan has about 80,000, from the great Ise shrine to small roadside sanctuaries. Visitors pass under the torii gate, rinse their hands and mouth at a water basin, then bow twice, clap twice and bow once before the shrine, offering a short prayer.

Priests offer food, sake and prayers (noritonorito Prayers addressed to the kami by Shinto priests. Glossary) to the kami and perform purifications and blessings for births, children, weddings, cars and new buildings. Many homes keep a small kami altar, the kamidana.

The high points of the year are the matsurimatsuri A shrine festival, often with processions carrying the kami through the streets. Glossary, festivals in which the kami is carried through the streets in a portable shrine, accompanied by drums, dances and crowds.

Shinto has no sacred book that defines belief. The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the oldest Japanese chronicles, preserve the myths of creation, the deeds of the kami and the origin of the imperial line, and they are honoured as classics rather than as revelation.

The ritual prayers (norito), first written down in the Engishiki of 927, are still recited by priests. Much of Shinto lives instead in practice, architecture, landscape and the rhythm of the seasons.