Shinto: kami, shrines, ritual and where it differs from Japanese Buddhism

IQuick read in five sentences

One. Shinto has no founder. It grew slowly out of the worship of mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, the sea and the dead, and only much later acquired a name, and it acquired one precisely because a word was needed to tell it apart from the newly arrived Buddhism.

Two. At its centre is the kami 神, a word usually rendered in Vietnamese as thần, but a direct translation like that falls short.

Three. The moral axis of Shinto is not the pair of good and evil but the pair of purity and pollution. From this come harae 祓 and misogi 禊, the rites of purification performed before stepping into a sacred place.

Four. The place of worship is called a shrine 神社, recognisable by its torii 鳥居 gate, which is at heart a boundary line between the ordinary world and the sacred.

Five. Shinto has no conversion procedure and no register of adherents, so its adherent count cannot be read the way one reads the figures of religions with a church organisation.

The page runs through fifteen sections. Wherever there is controversy, it splits the account into two boxes: one according to the tradition's teaching and one according to the historical record. The section on modern history records only events and dates.

IIA religion with no birthday

Ask when Shinto was born and there is no answer, because it was not born, it grew. On the Japanese archipelago, people worshipped mountains, the sea, great rocks, ancient trees and the dead long before any text recorded it. The scattered customs of each region and each village were gradually put in order and entered into the court's records, and only then did the whole acquire a name.

When the word Shinto came into use

The two characters 神道, read Thần Đạo in Sino-Vietnamese and Shintō in Japanese, literally mean the way of the kami, and they also have a native Japanese reading, kami no michi. What is notable is that this name was not one the religion gave itself from the start. It appeared once Buddhism had reached Japan and people needed a word to distinguish the old form of worship from Butsudō 仏道, the Way of the Buddha. Shinto got its name because another religion had come to live beside it, much as happened with the ancestor veneration of the Vietnamese.

A religion of place

Shinto clings to place. Every locality has its own kami, every clan has its own kami. What makes a shrine is not a universal doctrine but the bond between a particular community and a particular kami at a particular spot. That is why Shinto has almost never gone out to proselytise, has not translated scriptures to spread its teaching, and has set no rite of conversion. A religion whose core is the mountain behind the village is very hard to carry elsewhere, and that is why almost all of its shrines lie within the territory of Japan.

IIICore teachings

Shinto has no creed. There is no formula of faith to recite, no numbered commandments, no body of doctrine that everyone must learn by heart to count as a follower. The consequence is bigger than people imagine: no one has the authority to declare that a person believes wrongly, because there is no correct version to check against. What is standardised in Shinto is ritual, not belief. This is also why a great many Japanese people say they follow no religion yet still visit a shrine at New Year: the Japanese word for religion implies an organisation with doctrine and membership.

Kami, and why translating it simply as god falls short

Vietnamese readers are used to reading the character 神 as thần, and that reading is not wrong as far as the character goes. But the Vietnamese word thần has absorbed too many layers of meaning from Taoism: on hearing it, a Vietnamese reader pictures a being with a post in the heavenly bureaucracy, with rank and with a royal decree of investiture. Kami are not necessarily like that. One, kami are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and they are strong within their own domain. Two, kami are not a creator standing outside the world. The kami are born within the world. Three, the boundary between kami and humans is not a wall. Because of these three differences, international scholarship usually leaves the word kami untranslated. An ancient notion also divides the spirit of a kami into two aspects, aramitama 荒魂, the violent aspect, and nigimitama 和魂, the gentle aspect, so rites are held not only to ask for blessings but also to calm that power.

Eight million kami is a figure of speech, not a number

One often hears that Shinto has eight million kami. The original phrase is yaoyorozu no kami 八百万の神, literally eight hundred times ten thousand. It is a conventional idiom meaning too many to count, much as Vietnamese speaks of trăm họ (the hundred families), muôn dân (the myriad people) or ba hồn bảy vía (three souls and seven spirits).

The only countable figure lies in the state records of old. The Engishiki 延喜式, begun in 905 with its main part completed in 927, contains a section called the Jinmyōchō 神名帳, the register of kami names, which lists 2,861 shrines recognised by the imperial court. For the number of kami in that register, sources differ by one, some giving 3,132 and others 3,131, and the library records both rather than picking one at random.

Purity and pollution, the real axis of this religion

This is the greatest difference between Shinto and most of the religions Vietnamese readers are familiar with. Many religions build their moral axis on the pair of good and evil, with reward, punishment and a final judgement. Shinto builds its axis on the pair of purity and pollution: the human task is to stay clean, and to wash again after becoming soiled. It follows that ancient Shinto built no system of reward and punishment after death (much of what Japanese people picture about the afterlife was brought by Buddhism), and that every Shinto rite begins with an act of purification.

Harae and misogi

Harae 祓 is purification in general, usually performed for others by someone holding that office, through spoken prayers and ritual implements. Misogi 禊 is purification by water, and at root it means immersing oneself in a stream, in the sea, under a waterfall.

Ordinary people today meet harae in abbreviated form. At the entrance to every shrine there is a water basin called a temizuya 手水舎: the visitor fills a ladle, rinses the left hand, rinses the right hand, pours water into the cupped left hand to rinse the mouth, then tilts the ladle upright so the water runs down the handle. The whole sequence uses a single ladle of water, and it is nothing other than misogi shrunk to the size of two hands. On the last day of June and the last day of December, many shrines hold the Ōharae 大祓, the Great Purification, for the whole community.

Ujigami and ujiko

Ujigami 氏神 originally meant the kami of a clan, and later broadened into the kami protecting a residential area. The people living in that area are called ujiko 氏子. A related word is ubusunagami 産土神, the kami of the land where a person was born. This is closer to the Vietnamese concept of the thành hoàng làng, the guardian spirit of a village, than to the concept of a parishioner. Which shrine you are an ujiko of is not your choice. It follows from where you live, and this very way of counting is the root of the very large adherent figure in Japanese government statistics.

IVAmaterasu and the Ise Grand Shrine

Shinto has no founder, so where other religions place the figure of a founder, Shinto places a kami: Amaterasu Ōmikami 天照大神, read in Sino-Vietnamese as Thiên Chiếu Đại Thần, literally the great kami who illuminates heaven, associated with the sun and worshipped at the Ise Grand Shrine. In keeping with this library's rules, the page does not describe images in a way that invites the reader to picture a portrait.

The Ise Grand Shrine

Ise Jingū 伊勢神宮, commonly called Thần cung Ise in Vietnamese and the Ise Grand Shrine in English, lies in Mie Prefecture. Its official name is simply Jingū 神宮, the Shrine. It is a complex of 125 shrines large and small, centred on two cores: the Naikū 内宮, the Inner Shrine, officially Kōtai Jingū 皇大神宮, which enshrines Amaterasu, and the Gekū 外宮, the Outer Shrine, officially Toyouke Daijingū 豊受大神宮, which enshrines the kami in charge of food and harvests. Custom holds that pilgrims visit the Outer Shrine first. The architectural style is called shinmei-zukuri 神明造: unpainted natural wood, a thatched roof and a raised floor.

Shikinen Sengū, a complete rebuilding every twenty years

Once every twenty years, the main sanctuaries of both the Inner and the Outer Shrine are rebuilt entirely new on the adjacent plot, to exactly the old dimensions and style, together with all the sacred objects and ceremonial vestments. The sacred body of the kami is carried in procession from the old building to the new one, then the old building is dismantled and its timber distributed to other shrines. This custom is called Shikinen Sengū 式年遷宮.

The most recent was the 62nd, in 2013, and the 63rd is scheduled for 2033. Tradition records that the custom began in the reign of Empress Jitō, after Emperor Tenmu had ordered it but did not live to carry it out, so the first rebuilding is usually dated to around 690. The custom was once broken for more than a hundred years by the civil wars of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, and sources also note that in the early period the interval was at times counted as nineteen years.

Each year the Ise Grand Shrine issues a kind of talisman called Jingū Taima 神宮大麻, passed through shrines across the country to individual households, where it is placed on the small home altar called a kamidana 神棚.

VThe earliest texts, and why they are not scripture

Let it be said plainly in the first sentence: Shinto has no scripture. No book is regarded as revelation, and no text is required reading for followers. What Shinto has is a number of ancient texts recording myths, genealogies and ritual procedure.

The Kojiki 古事記, read in Sino-Vietnamese as Cổ Sự Ký, completed in 712, is the oldest surviving intact text in Japan. The Nihon Shoki 日本書紀, read in Sino-Vietnamese as Nhật Bản Thư Kỷ, completed in 720, is larger, written in Classical Chinese in the manner of Chinese official histories, and in many places it records several variant versions of the same tale side by side.

VICommonly encountered kami

Because the kami are without limit, no book lists them all, but some kami are worshipped in so many places that one meets them in any region of Japan.

When a major shrine founds a new shrine elsewhere to worship the same kami, a rite of dividing the spirit (bunrei) is performed, inviting a portion of that kami to dwell in the new place, and this does not weaken the original kami, much like lighting one candle from another. This is the mechanism by which Inari and Hachiman are present in tens of thousands of places.

VIIShrines and the torii

Jinja 神社, called thần xã in Vietnamese and usually rendered in English as shrine, is the place of worship of Shinto. The names come in several ranks: jinja is the general term, jingū 神宮 is reserved for places connected to the imperial house, and taisha 大社 for places that serve as the head shrine of a network.

The torii, a boundary

The torii 鳥居 is the gate standing at the start of the approach to a shrine: two upright posts with two crossbeams laid across the top. It is also the international symbol of Shinto and even appears in the Unicode character set. The most important thing about the torii is its function: it is a boundary line between the ordinary world and the sacred. A worshipper observing proper form bows once before passing through the torii, and on the approach path called the sandō 参道 avoids walking down the exact centre, because the centre is regarded as the path of the kami. Nor does a torii necessarily stand at a gateway: there are torii standing in the middle of rice fields, in forests, in the sea, in front of a great rock. Wherever there is a torii, that place is marked as sacred.

The parts of a shrine

What worshippers take home

Vietnamese readers will find much that is familiar: the ema is close to the custom of writing petitions to the spirits, the omikuji to drawing divination sticks, the omamori to a protective amulet, and the kamidana to the altar for the guardian spirits in a Vietnamese home. The difference lies in the custom of returning: Shinto talismans and fortunes have a period of use, and when it ends they are taken back to where they came from to be burned, because purity wears away over time.

VIIIRituals and festivals

If one had to name one thing that makes Shinto what it is, it would be ritual. This religion demands no particular belief, but it is very strict about how things are done. A ceremony, large or small, almost always follows four movements: purification, inviting the kami, presenting offerings and reciting prayers, then sending the kami off.

How ordinary people pray

The most common form of prayer at the worship hall today is called two bows, two claps, one bow, in Japanese nirei nihakushu ichirei 二礼二拍手一礼: drop a coin into the offering box, ring the bell if there is one, bow twice, clap twice, put the palms together to pray, then bow once more. This is a common form rather than a universal rule. Some major shrines keep their own customs, for example clapping four times at some places. At funerals, people clap without making a sound.

Offerings to the kami are collectively called shinsen, including rice, rice wine, salt, water, fish, vegetables and fruit. Another characteristic offering is the tamagushi 玉串, a branch of sakaki 榊, the sacred tree, tied with strips of white paper. One difference from a Vietnamese altar is that Shinto almost never burns votive paper.

Matsuri

Matsuri 祭, often written 祭り, is a shrine festival. The word shares its root with the verb matsuru, to worship: a matsuri is first and foremost a rite, and the lively street celebration is what comes with it.

A typical matsuri has two layers. The inner layer is the closed rite in the sanctuary, often held at night. The outer layer is the procession: the sacred body of the kami is invited into a portable shrine called a mikoshi, and the whole community carries it around the area, the idea being that the kami is visiting its own land. Vietnamese readers will immediately see the resemblance to the procession of the village guardian spirit's palanquin at a Vietnamese village festival. The matsuri calendar follows the farming rhythm: prayers for the crops in spring, thanksgiving for the harvest in autumn, warding off calamity in summer.

One point about funerals needs to be recorded accurately. Shinto does have a funeral rite, called sōsai, but in practice most funerals in Japan are conducted according to Buddhist rites. The reason lies in the very teaching described above: death is classed as the heaviest form of pollution, so shrines have traditionally avoided involvement with funerals, and Buddhism filled that gap for many centuries. From this arose the pattern Japanese people often describe in themselves: a baby is taken to the shrine, a death is handled by the temple.

IXTimeline

Because Shinto has no birthday, the timeline below does not begin with a founding date. It records milestones large enough to change the shape of this religion: the times it was set down in writing, the times its relationship with Buddhism changed, and the times its relationship with the state changed.

• Thế kỷ 6Buddhism reaches Japan
  Only from this point was there a need to name the old form of worship to distinguish it from the new religion. The word Shinto appeared in that context.
• khoảng 690The first Shikinen Sengū at Ise
  Tradition records that the custom of rebuilding the sanctuaries every twenty years began in the reign of Empress Jitō. The 62nd took place in 2013, and the 63rd is scheduled for 2033.
• 712Completion of the Kojiki
  The Kojiki (Cổ Sự Ký), the oldest surviving intact text in Japan, recording myths and genealogies by order of the imperial court.
• 720Completion of the Nihon Shoki
  The first official history, written in Classical Chinese, recording many variant versions of the same myth side by side.
• 905 tới 927Compilation of the Engishiki
  Administrative regulations with a section setting out procedures for worship and a register of kami names listing 2,861 shrines recognised by the imperial court.
• Thế kỷ 9 tới 15Shinto and Buddhism fuse
  The honji suijaku 本地垂迹 theory takes shape, and temples and shrines share the same grounds. By the fifteenth century, Yoshida Shintō 吉田神道 places Shinto in the position of the root.
• 1868The shinbutsu bunri orders
  The Meiji government issues a series of orders 神仏分離 separating Shinto from Buddhism: removing Buddha images from shrines, abolishing the Buddhist titles given to kami, and forcing the monks in charge of shrines to choose one side.
• 1868 tới đầu thập niên 1870Haibutsu kishaku
  The movement 廃仏毀釈 against Buddhism in many localities led to thousands of temples being closed. Its intensity varied greatly from region to region.
• 1868 tới 1945The period of State Shinto
  The period scholars call Kokka Shintō 国家神道: shrines were managed and funded by the state, and shrine rites were classed outside the category of religion in the administrative classification of the time.
• 1945The Shinto Directive
  On 15 December, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers issued the document commonly called the Shinto Directive, ending state sponsorship and control of State Shinto.
• 1946Founding of the Association of Shinto Shrines
  On 3 February, three older organisations merged to form Jinja Honchō 神社本庁, a non-state body covering most of the country's shrines, which regards the Ise Grand Shrine as its paramount shrine.

XFusion with Buddhism and the separation of 1868

This is the most important historical point of the page, and also the one Vietnamese readers grasp most easily, because Vietnamese people are used to a household that both worships the Buddha and burns incense to its ancestors without feeling that it follows two religions. In Japan the matter went further: for more than a thousand years, Shinto and Buddhism were not two religions standing side by side but a single mixture.

The most systematic explanation of that fusion is the honji suijaku 本地垂迹 theory, which took shape from around the ninth to the twelfth century. The term, read bản địa thùy tích in Sino-Vietnamese, literally means original ground, manifested trace: honji is the root, suijaku is the trace let down. According to this theory, a Buddha or a Bodhisattva is the root, and the kami worshipped in Japan is that root appearing in a form suited to this land. From this came the title gongen 権現.

On that foundation, Ryōbu Shintō 両部神道 linked the two shrines of Ise with the two mandalas of Esoteric Buddhism. In the fifteenth century, the Yoshida Shintō 吉田神道 of Yoshida Kanetomo reversed the relationship, holding that Shinto was the true root. In the eighteenth century, Motoori Norinaga and then Hirata Atsutane built up Fukko Shintō 復古神道. In fairness to the historical record, it should be noted that throughout this time most ordinary people paid no attention to these theoretical systems.

The traces of a thousand years of fusion did not vanish with one decree. To this day there are temples with a torii in their grounds and shrines that keep old names with a Buddhist colouring. The biggest division of labour remains intact: joyful occasions go to the shrine, funerals go to the temple, and a great many Japanese families keep both a kamidana on the wall and a Buddhist altar called a butsudan in the same house.

XIThree main streams

Because Shinto has no single church and no written doctrine, the way it divides into streams is unlike the way other religions divide into schools and denominations. The most common classification divides it into three streams, which differ in their form of organisation rather than in which kami they worship.

These three streams are not mutually exclusive. A person can visit a shrine at New Year in the manner of the first stream and keep up the worship of the kitchen kami at home in the manner of the third, without belonging to any sect of the second. This is a fundamental difference from the way a Catholic belongs to a diocese. Alongside these three streams, the history of Shinto also includes distinct schools of interpretation such as Ryōbu Shintō, Yoshida Shintō and Fukko Shintō, discussed in the section on Buddhism.

XIIThe Association of Shinto Shrines and the priesthood

Shinto has no church in the sense of a structure with doctrine and the authority to rule on matters of belief. What it has is an administrative organisation covering the shrines. Jinja Honchō 神社本庁, the Association of Shinto Shrines (Thần xã Bản sảnh in Sino-Vietnamese), was founded on 3 February 1946 through the merger of three older organisations. The organisation's official website states two things clearly: it regards the Ise Grand Shrine as its paramount shrine, and it covers about eighty thousand shrines. Below it, each prefecture has a jinja-chō 神社庁, a prefectural shrine office.

Here two sources diverge, and the library records both. The Association's own website gives the figure of about 80,000 shrines, while the statistics of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs as of 31 December 2023 record 84,113 religious corporations in the Shinto lineage. The two figures count two different things: one counts the shrines within the organisation, the other counts religious corporations registered under the law, including places outside the Association and also the sects. Some major shrines operate independently, among them Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto.

Priests and miko

Those in charge of worship at a shrine are collectively called shinshoku 神職, Shinto priests. Vietnamese writing usually follows the word kannushi 神主, which Japanese people also use for anyone who looks after a shrine. The ranks from top to bottom: the gūji 宮司 heads a shrine, the negi 禰宜 is the assistant, the gon-negi 権禰宜 is an ordinary priest, and the shutsushi 出仕 is a newcomer to the profession. Shinto priests are not monastics: they marry and have families, and at many small shrines the office is passed down within one family over many generations. To obtain a rank, one studies at Kokugakuin or Kōgakkan. Women can become priests, including holding the office of gūji.

Miko 巫女 are young women who assist at shrines, wearing white robes and vermilion hakama trousers. They assist at rites, present offerings, perform the ritual dance called kagura, and sell amulets and fortunes. Two points need to be stated precisely. One, in the present classification of Japanese shrines, miko are not counted among the priests. Two, in ancient times the word miko referred to a woman who served as a medium through whom a kami would enter to deliver its words, close to the bà đồng, the spirit medium of Vietnamese folk religion.

XIIIAdherent numbers, and why the two figures are so far apart

The library must say it plainly from the outset: there are two ways of counting Shinto followers, and they produce two figures tens of times apart. Both have official sources, and neither is wrong by its own method of counting.

Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, the body responsible for religious affairs, publishes the Religious Yearbook every year, based on figures reported by the religious organisations themselves. According to the edition published in December 2024, with figures as of 31 December 2023, the Shinto lineage has 83,371,429 adherents and 84,113 religious corporations.

The figure from self-identification surveys

When people are asked directly which religion they follow, the figure collapses. Sociological surveys in Japan over many decades have consistently found that only about 3 percent of the population identify themselves as followers of Shinto.

The Pew Research Center survey of religious life in East Asia, conducted among 10,390 adults from June to September 2023 and published on 17 June 2024, did not even list Shinto as a separate category in its results for Japan, because so few people identify that way. In that survey, 46 percent of Japanese adults identified as Buddhist, 42 percent said they had no religion, and only 6 percent said religion was very important in their lives. The same survey found that 70 percent of Japanese people said they had made offerings of food or drink in the past twelve months to honour their ancestors.

The most honest conclusion this library can offer: for Shinto, the question how many adherents does it have is the wrong question. The better question is how many people practise it. One further piece of evidence: the Japanese police used to publish nationwide figures for New Year shrine visits until 2009, then stopped, and those last figures ran to tens of millions of visits in the first three days of the year alone.

Outside Japan and in Vietnam

Almost all of this religion's shrines lie within the territory of Japan. Outside Japan there are some shrines founded by Japanese emigrant communities from the early twentieth century, concentrated in Hawaii and Brazil. They are very small in scale and serve the emigrant communities, rather than being the result of a missionary movement.

In Vietnam, Shinto has no legal status and no places of worship. According to figures published by the Ban Tôn giáo Chính phủ (the Government Committee for Religious Affairs) on 1 August 2025, Vietnam recognises 16 religions with 43 religious organisations registered to operate, with 27.7 million followers and 29,890 places of worship, and Shinto is not among them.

XIVThrough the eyes of feng shui

The Japanese have their own art of reading houses, called kasō

The Japanese do have an art of reading the physiognomy of a house, called kasō 家相, read in Sino-Vietnamese as gia tướng. Three points need to be made clear.

One, kasō is not part of Shinto. It is tied to Onmyōdō 陰陽道, the Way of yin and yang, a divinatory art imported from the continent that became a department of the imperial court from the Nara and Heian periods, with dedicated officials called yin-yang masters. Its theoretical basis is yin and yang and the five phases.

Two, kasō has taboos that are very distinctively Japanese, the most prominent being the kimon 鬼門, the demon gate, which refers to the northeast, regarded as an inauspicious direction, while the opposite direction, the southwest, is called the urakimon. People avoid placing the kitchen, the bathroom and the toilet in those two directions, a system of taboos that cannot be converted directly into the East Four and West Four groups of personal trigrams.

Three, the capital Heian-kyō 平安京, today's Kyoto, founded in 794, is recorded as having been sited according to the principle of shijin sōō 四神相応, read in Sino-Vietnamese as tứ thần tương ứng, the correspondence of the four guardian beasts. This is the very set of four symbols Vietnamese readers know as Thanh Long, Bạch Hổ, Chu Tước and Huyền Vũ: the Azure Dragon, the White Tiger, the Vermilion Bird and the Black Tortoise.

What rule governs the orientation of a shrine

The honest answer is: Shinto has no general rule on orientation. Catholic churches have a tradition of facing east, and mosques face Mecca, but Japanese shrines have no equivalent mandatory rule. What determines the siting and orientation of a shrine is its relationship to the sacred object: if the sacred body of the kami is a mountain or a rock, the worship hall must face toward it. Many shrines face south or east, but this is an observable tendency, not a rule.

XVCommon misunderstandings

Shinto is a religion often misrepresented in popular Vietnamese-language books, partly because it has no text that can be consulted to settle questions definitively, and partly because most information about it reaches Vietnamese readers through travel and film. This section gathers the questions asked most often.

?Quick Questions

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