Purification in Daily and Historical Practice

The purity kegare threatens is temporary and recoverable by design, which is part of what separates Shinto's framework from moral guilt in other religious traditions: nobody carries kegare permanently, and nobody is excluded from Shinto practice for having incurred it, only asked to wait and be purified before approaching the kami again. In ordinary shrine practice today this shows up in small, routine forms rather than dramatic ritual: worshippers rinse their hands and mouth at a water basin called a temizuya before entering shrine grounds at all, a miniature harae performed by every visitor regardless of why they have come. Larger scale purification became a matter of state policy for a period of Japanese history: during the Meiji era, and again more forcefully under State Shinto in the decades before 1945, the government standardized and promoted purification rites nationally as part of establishing Shinto as a unifying civic practice, a use of the tradition the postwar Shinto Directive of 1946 formally ended by separating Shinto from state sponsorship. Traditional taboo periods surrounding childbirth and death, historically requiring a set number of days of separation from shrine visits and sometimes from the wider community, have loosened considerably in contemporary practice, though the underlying logic, that these are conditions to be purified through rather than permanent marks against a person, remains the same one recorded in Shinto's earliest sources.