Because kami are approached rather than believed in, the organising category of Shinto practice is not sin but purity. Pollution, kegare, arises from death, blood, illness and disorder; it is a condition rather than a moral fault, and it is removed by purification, harae, with water, salt or the waving of a wand. Worshippers rinse hands and mouth at a basin before approaching a shrine, and the great rites of the ritual calendar are largely acts of cleansing and renewal. The practical consequence is that Shinto has very little to say about ethics as a system and a great deal to say about how to conduct an approach.
Practice is correspondingly a matter of what is done rather than what is held. Offerings of rice, sake and branches, a bow, two claps, another bow, a coin, a drawn fortune, an annual festival in which the kami is carried through the streets in a portable shrine. There is no weekly congregation, no scripture read aloud to a gathering, no creed and no requirement to affiliate. Most Japanese take part in shrine observances at new year and at life-cycle occasions while using Buddhist rites for funerals, which is not a contradiction but a division of labour: the kami are associated with life and growth and are averse to death pollution.
The relationship with Buddhism was for over a millennium one of amalgamation, with kami understood as local manifestations of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and shrines and temples sharing sites and personnel. The Meiji government forcibly separated them after 1868 and constructed State Shinto, in which shrine rites were declared non-religious civic observance, the emperor's divine descent was taught in schools, and participation was in effect compulsory, an arrangement that was central to wartime nationalism and was dismantled by the occupation authorities in 1945. Modern shrine Shinto is a private religious body, and disputes over official visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where the war dead including convicted war criminals are enshrined, keep the history in the news.