Shinto
Shinto items test the nature of kami, purity and pollution, shrine practice, the textual sources, and the modern history of State Shinto and its disestablishment.
Kami and cosmology
Kami are deities, spirits of natural phenomena, ancestors and sometimes exceptional people; they are not omnipotent creators in the Abrahamic sense. Amaterasu, the sun kami, is enshrined at Ise; Izanagi and Izanami are the primordial pair; Susanoo is a storm kami. Musubi is the power of generation and growth. The Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720) record the myths.
Purity and practice
Kegare is pollution; harae is purification; misogi is purification by water; imi is avoidance of defilement. Shrines (jinja) are marked by torii and shimenawa, with a honden for the kami and a haiden for worshippers. Households keep a kamidana. Norito are formal prayers; matsuri are festivals in which a mikoshi carries the kami through the streets. There is no founder, no fixed creed, and no strong emphasis on an afterlife beyond a vague Yomi.
History
Shinbutsu-shugo described centuries of fusion with Buddhism. In 1868 the Meiji policy of shinbutsu bunri forcibly separated the two, and State Shinto made shrine ritual a civic duty. The 1946 occupation directive disestablished State Shinto, and the Jinja Honcho now coordinates many shrines.
Worked example
A new building is consecrated: a priest purifies the site and invites the kami to dwell within. Reasoning: the purification is harae, necessary before contact with the sacred, and the installed object becomes the shintai, the kami's bodily presence. Note that the rite is about purity and gratitude, not about salvation from sin, which is a foreign frame.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling Shinto simply a nature religion; it also includes clan and ancestor kami.
- Treating wartime State Shinto as identical with all Shinto.
- Mistaking the torii for a temple gate; it marks sacred space at a shrine.
- Forgetting that most Japanese use Shinto for life-cycle blessings and Buddhism for funerals.