The native religion of Japan — the way of the kami, the countless sacred presences felt in nature, place, and ancestry. It has no founder, no official scripture in the strict sense, and no fixed creed, only shrines, purification, and festival. For over a thousand years it fused with Buddhism, then in the modern era was briefly forged by the state into an instrument of emperor-worship and nationalism, before returning after 1945 to the quiet rhythms of Japanese life.
Most Japanese will tell a foreign visitor that they are not religious. Then they will pass through a great wooden gate at New Year, rinse their hands at a stone basin, toss a coin, bow, and clap twice before an unseen presence. That gate is a torii, and what waits beyond it is a kami, one of the countless sacred forces that Shinto finds in mountains, rivers, old trees, and great ancestors. Shinto means the way of the kami. It has no founder and no holy book, no single creed to believe. It is less a faith you sign up to than a set of places and gestures woven so deep into Japanese life that people perform them without calling themselves believers. For much of its history it was not a sharply separate religion, but the local ground on which all the rest of Japanese life stood. Only once, in the modern age, was it briefly remade into something else: a cult of the emperor, harnessed to the machinery of the state.