Shinto may be seen as a living current that has flowed through Japanese history, changing its course while retaining its elemental concern with kami and ritual purity. In its earliest forms, it existed as local, clan-based practices without a unified doctrine, centered on nature worship, ancestor veneration, and agricultural rites. Kami were experienced as the presences inhabiting landscapes, weather, and family lines, and ritual life revolved around offerings, seasonal observances, and purification. These practices were transmitted orally and woven into the fabric of community life, rather than articulated as a systematic theology.

With the arrival of Buddhism and the influence of Confucian thought, this indigenous current entered into a long period of creative syncretism. Kami were reinterpreted as manifestations or protectors of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, and shrines and temples often shared the same sacred space. Court-sponsored compilations such as the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki articulated myths that linked the imperial line to the sun goddess Amaterasu, giving religious form to political authority. Over time, theories such as honji suijaku and schools like Ryōbu Shinto, Ise Shinto, and Yoshida Shinto sought either to harmonize kami with Buddhist cosmology or to assert Shinto’s distinctiveness, even its superiority, within this shared religious world.

In the early modern era, scholarly movements devoted to “national learning” turned back to ancient texts in an effort to purify Shinto of foreign elements and recover what was perceived as its original essence. This intellectual reorientation prepared the ground for a more radical transformation under the modern state, when Shinto was administratively separated from Buddhism and reshaped into a national ideology centered on the emperor’s divine ancestry. Shrines were framed as patriotic institutions, rituals were standardized and woven into civic life, and Shinto was used to cultivate loyalty, cultural pride, and, at times, a sense of superiority and militaristic fervor. Alongside this official form, various Shinto-based sects and movements emerged, drawing on the same mythic and ritual reservoir in more explicitly religious ways.

After the collapse of this state-centered configuration, Shinto was disestablished and returned to the sphere of voluntary religious and communal practice. The emperor publicly renounced divine status, shrines became independent religious bodies, and freedom of religion was formally guaranteed. In this new setting, Shinto has largely resumed its role as a decentralized network of shrines, sects, and local traditions, oriented to life-cycle rites, festivals, and the quiet maintenance of relationships with kami. Its historical journey reveals a tradition capable of profound adaptation—moving from local cults to imperial ideology and back to community ritual—while continually circling around the same core gestures of reverence, purification, and gratitude toward the unseen presences that shape human and natural life.