Shinto rarely functions in Japan as a system of exclusive personal belief in the way many other traditions in this atlas do; surveys consistently find large majorities of Japanese participating in Shinto linked practices, a New Year shrine visit, a wedding conducted in Shinto style, a child's Shichi Go San blessing at ages three, five and seven, while relatively few describe themselves as adherents of a religion at all. This apparent contradiction reflects how thoroughly Shinto's ritual calendar and aesthetic sensibility have been absorbed into ordinary Japanese cultural life rather than retained as a separately labeled system of doctrine.
The rhythm of matsuri, local shrine festivals tied to planting, harvest and other seasonal turning points, still structures community life in towns and city neighborhoods across the country, and the physical presence of torii gates, purification basins and shrine forests within otherwise secular urban space keeps kami veneration visually and spatially woven into everyday movement through Japanese cities. Japanese aesthetics more broadly, an emphasis on natural materials, asymmetry, seasonal awareness and the beauty of impermanence found in garden design, architecture and even packaging, are frequently traced by scholars of Japanese religion back to a Shinto sensibility of the kami as present within, rather than separate from, the natural world.