Shinto has shaped Japanese arts and culture most deeply by cultivating a sensibility that sees the natural world as permeated with sacred presence. This is visible in shrine architecture, where unpainted wood, thatched roofs, raised floors, and the iconic torii gate create spaces that harmonize with surrounding landscapes rather than dominate them. Sacred groves (chinju no mori) and the integration of shrines into forests and mountains exemplify an aesthetic in which built forms are extensions of a living environment inhabited by kami. Garden design echoes this vision, using rocks, water, and seasonal plants to suggest a world where nature is not merely scenery but a dwelling place of spirits. The resulting architectural and spatial language has become a template for broader Japanese ideas of simplicity, purity, and harmony with nature.

Performing arts likewise bear the imprint of Shinto ritual. Kagura, as sacred dance and music offered to the kami, stands at the root of later theatrical traditions, carrying forward stylized movement, masks, and mythic narratives such as the dance before Amaterasu. Elements of this ritual heritage appear in Noh and Kabuki, where themes of spirits, possession, and purification are woven into drama and performance. Taiko drumming, used in ceremonies to call kami and ward off malign influences, reinforces the sense that sound itself can delineate sacred space. Festivals (matsuri), with their processions, portable shrines, music, and communal celebration, extend these ritual arts into the fabric of communal life, structuring the cultural calendar around acts of reverence and gratitude.

Literature and visual arts draw heavily on Shinto cosmology and its attentiveness to the seasons. Early chronicles such as the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki provided mythic narratives and divine genealogies that later poets and artists reinterpreted in various forms. Waka and haiku, with their focus on seasonal change, landscape, and subtle emotional resonance, reflect a view of nature as alive with unseen presences. Landscape painting and woodblock prints frequently depict mountains, rivers, forests, shrines, and festivals, treating them as sites where human and divine realms intersect. Even aesthetic ideals that value natural imperfection and restraint can be read as expressions of reverence for the inherent spirit of things rather than for artificial embellishment.

Crafts and everyday practices also carry a Shinto imprint. Traditional crafts such as carpentry, sword-making, ceramics, and textiles have been shaped by the idea that objects and tools deserve careful, respectful treatment, in part because they participate in a world suffused with spirit. Motifs drawn from seasonal festivals and natural forms recur in decorative patterns, reinforcing awareness of cyclical time and local deities. Rituals of purification (harai, misogi) at shrines, with their emphasis on cleansing and the avoidance of defilement, resonate with broader cultural habits of cleanliness, order, and propriety. Through these intertwined expressions—architectural, performative, literary, visual, and ritual—Shinto functions less as a system of doctrine than as a pervasive orientation toward living in conscious relationship with a sacred, animate world.