Japan has around 100,000 Shinto shrines but no Shinto creed
Shinto has no founder, no central authority and no single doctrine. What holds it together is the kami, spirits believed to dwell in mountains, rivers and even the honoured dead. Most Japanese take part in both Shinto and Buddhist rites without feeling any contradiction, and for centuries the two were practically fused.
Scholars class Shinto as an East Asian religion; its practitioners often see it as Japan's native faith and a religion of nature. It is polytheistic and animistic, centred on kami that inhabit natural forces and striking landscape features. Worship happens at small household shelves called kamidana, at family shrines and at public jinja, where priests known as kannushi present food and drink to the resident kami to keep relations harmonious and win blessings.
Ritual life leans heavily on purity. Worshippers wash before approaching the kami, and cleaning rituals run through the whole tradition. Kagura dances, festivals and rites of passage are common, and shrines offer divination and sell amulets. Moral codes and afterlife teachings receive little attention, though the dead can become kami. Definitions vary: Joseph Cali and John Dougill boil it down to belief in kami, while Helen Hardacre stresses the institutions and communal life built on that worship.
Kami veneration goes back to the Yayoi period, roughly 300 BCE to 250 CE. Buddhism arrived at the close of the Kofun period and spread fast, and the two merged in a process called shinbutsu-shugo, with kami absorbed into Buddhist cosmology and increasingly given human form. The earliest written accounts come from the 8th-century Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. Whether Shinto counts as a separate religion before modern times is debated.
The Meiji era, from 1868 to 1912, changed that. Nationalist leaders stripped Buddhist elements out of kami worship and built State Shinto, which some historians treat as the birth of Shinto as a distinct religion; citizens were urged to venerate the emperor as a kami, and the Empire of Japan carried the faith elsewhere in East Asia. After defeat in World War II, religion and state were formally separated. Shinto is now Japan's largest religion by number, ahead of Buddhism.
Source: Shinto
