Shinto may be understood as Japan’s indigenous religious current, a “way of the kami” that orients human life toward the living presence of spirits in the world. These kami are not distant, abstract deities, but spiritual forces that inhabit mountains and rivers, trees and storms, ancestral lines, and particular places and objects. Rather than a fixed creed, Shinto is a pattern of reverence expressed through ritual, seasonal festivals, and everyday gestures of respect toward the unseen dimensions of nature and community. Its ethos leans toward harmony between humans and the natural environment, and toward the well-being of family, village, and nation, rather than toward detailed doctrines of sin or salvation. In this sense, Shinto is less a system of beliefs than a cultivated sensitivity to the sacred character of the world that is already here.

The historical roots of this tradition lie in very ancient animistic and shamanistic practices among the early inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago. Long before there was a name for it, local clans and communities honored their own tutelary kami, practiced ancestor veneration, and performed agricultural and seasonal rites that bound them to the land and to one another. Over time, as political authority became more centralized, these diverse local cults began to coalesce, with certain kami—most notably those associated with the imperial line—assuming a unifying symbolic role. The early chronicles known as the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki gathered myths and local traditions into a more coherent narrative, giving literary form to a worldview that had long been lived in practice.

Shinto did not arise in isolation, and its later shape cannot be separated from its encounter with other religious currents. With the arrival of Buddhism and the influence of Confucian thought, shrine-based worship of kami entered into a complex relationship with temple-based Buddhist practice, producing a long history of syncretic forms in which kami and buddhas were honored side by side. Only in later periods was Shinto more sharply distinguished and systematized as a separate tradition and, at times, harnessed to national ideology. Yet beneath these historical layers, the heart of Shinto remains the same: a network of local shrine practices, purification rites, and communal festivals through which people seek to live in right relationship with the kami, with nature, and with the subtle currents of life that flow through both.