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- the country. Most Japanese are tolerant enough to participate in the rituals of both Shinto and Buddhism, and to live peacefully side by side with Confucian�ism. All three religions interpenetrated to produce a system of ethics and morals which form the core of Japanese culture.
Shinto places great emphasis on physical cleanliness and spiritual purifica�tion. Actions which interfere with nature or are considered unnatural (including bodily filth) meet with extreme censureship for being destructive or impure. Shinto, on the other hand, maintains that individuals are continually evolving and striving for purity, and that ritual purification not only cleanses one�s body but also symbolizes the correct moral path. The present Japanese fondness for washing would thus seem to hark back to these ancient concepts of ritual purity. In addition to nature worship and purification, early Shinto was also concerned with fertility, especially as it affected rice production. Prayers offered at planting and harvest times are still an integral part of Shinto beliefs.
Shinto developed into several basic forms: popular or Folk Shinto, Sec�tarian or Denominational Shinto and State Shinto. Popular Shinto continued the original primitive nature worship and remained deeply rooted in the everyday life of the people. In Sectarian Shinto there are several popular sects or cults (thirteen in all before the Second World War), each with its own beliefs and ceremonies which vary from place to place. State Shinto, a more recent development, was (until 1946) more formalized and taught the divinity of the Emperor and the purity of the Japanese race. It stressed loyalty to the Emperor and to the State, and for a time was misused by the military elite as an inspiration for fanatical patriotism. (For example, the suicide pilots of the Second World War were called kamikaze, meaning �divine wind.�) However, after the war and the Emperor�s denial of his own divinity in 1946, Shinto was purged of its ultra-nationalism and restored to its original state, free of government intervention, as a loosely organized worship of countless natural deities.
Shinto Shrines
The focus of Shinto worship is the shrine, or jinja, which came to symbolize the kinship between man and the kami. Shinto shrines were often located in places where people felt the strong presence of natural forces. Today, tens of thousands of these shrines, large and small, old and new, dot Japan�s country�side in natural surroundings, often far from human habitation. According to a survey taken around 1903, there were nearly two hundred thousand shrines throughout the country. By 1920, they had been reduced to about one hundred and ten thousand. Today, there are approximately eighty thousand.
Ryobu Torii
Kasuga Torii Myojin Torii
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