Kami (sacred spirits in nature)

No English word fits. Gods, spirits, deities and divinities each import assumptions that do not hold.

Motoori Norinaga, the great eighteenth-century scholar of the native tradition, gave the definition still most often quoted: kami are the deities of heaven and earth and the spirits residing in their shrines, and also human beings, birds, beasts, trees, seas, mountains and anything else whatever which possesses extraordinary and preeminent qualities and inspires awe. He added, pointedly, that this includes things that are evil or frightening, since these too are awe-inspiring.

So the category takes in Amaterasu, the sun goddess from whom the imperial line is traced, and Susanoo, her disruptive brother; it takes in Mount Fuji, particular waterfalls, ancient trees marked with a straw rope, and unusual rocks; it takes in ancestors, emperors, and figures such as the scholar Sugawara no Michizane, enshrined after his death and now petitioned by students before examinations. New kami continue to be recognised. The traditional expression yaoyorozu no kami, eight million kami, means uncountably many rather than a figure.

Three consequences follow that a reader coming from a monotheistic background should register. Kami are not omnipotent and not omniscient; they have limited domains and can be neglected, offended or pleased. They are not necessarily benevolent; a kami with a violent aspect must be pacified, and enshrinement is sometimes precisely a means of settling a dangerous spirit. And they are not outside the world; there is no creation from nothing, the founding myths describe the islands and the kami being generated together, and the problem of evil in the Western form does not arise, because no single omnipotent benevolent will is being held responsible for everything.

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.