Kami

Kami is the central object of reverence in Shinto, and the usual translation "god" fits it poorly. Kami are the deities of the myths, Amaterasu the sun, Susanoo the storm, but the word reaches far wider: it takes in ancestors, striking features of the landscape, natural forces, and, in principle, any being or thing whose presence commands awe. The eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga gave the classic definition: kami is whatever is extraordinary and inspires a feeling of awe, whether noble or base, good or malign. The atlas keeps this entry for the concept and files individual kami, such as Amaterasu or Inari, as their own deity entries.

Two features distinguish kami from the "God" of the monotheisms. They are plural, tradition speaks of the yaoyorozu no kami, the "eight million kami," a number meaning innumerable, and they are immanent and local, dwelling in particular shrines, mountains, trees and rivers rather than standing outside the world as its sole creator. Kami are not omnipotent and not necessarily moral exemplars; they are powers to be honoured, kept in good relation, and approached through purity and ritual rather than through belief in a creed.

The kami are as old as the earliest Japanese texts, the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki of the eighth century narrate their generation and their descent into the imperial line, but the idea of "Shinto" as a distinct religion with kami at its centre is in important respects a later construction. For most of Japanese history kami were venerated alongside, and thoroughly mixed with, Buddhism; the sharp separation of the two was a deliberate policy of the modern state.

The nativist scholarship (kokugaku) of the eighteenth century, and Norinaga above all, worked to recover an idea of the kami and of Japanese antiquity purified of Buddhist and Chinese overlay. In the modern period this fed something more consequential: from 1868 the Meiji government forcibly separated kami-worship from Buddhism and built what is usually called State Shinto, in which shrine rites and the divine descent of the emperor were made instruments of national ideology up to 1945, when the postwar settlement disestablished it and the emperor renounced any claim to divinity. The atlas treats this history carefully: the veneration of kami is far older and far broader than the state cult that briefly harnessed it, and reducing kami to that episode would misdescribe the wider tradition.