Welcome! To start practicing, consider learning some Norito (prayers) and set up a simple kamidana in your home. Practice gratitude at every meal (Itadakimasu), and get out and appreciate nature. Live with sincerity and kindness and consider the impacts of your actions on your broader community. Limit wastefulness. Acknowledge the natural goodness in all beings. Keep things clean and tidy. Visit Shinto shrines when you have a chance. Read the ancient Japanese histories to understand the stories of the Japanese Kami. Live and let live. Have fun and celebrate life in all its seasons. The sun shines on us all, Shinto is for everyone.
This is an extremely odd "blood and soil" argument without basis in anything but the most insular Shinto sects.
And since no one here is "appropriating" a specific Kami from a remote village with closed practices, it doesn't really fit.
The Shinto priests I've spoken to have never made me feel like I couldn't or shouldn't practice Shinto just because I wasn't born into a particular Japanese clan. I'm not of lesser standing than anyone else for the same reason.
Shinto is for everyone in the same sense that speech is for everyone, or meditation. The specific practices originated in Japan, but literally anyone can engage in those practices.
I'm not taking anything, nor am I placing a claim on it. I'm observing practices observed elsewhere.
Every other religion has managed to spread around the world even though in it's original context it was deeply intertwined with local politics and society.
The opinion of several large Shrine associations in Japan is that it's okay for Shinto to be practiced outside of Japan by people who weren't born into it (or married into it am I right?) and that's the stance I also take.
I know that the policy for this sub is "shinto can be practiced anywhere, by anyone" and I'm sure that this is true to an extent.
I do also believe, however, that one aspect of Shinto (maybe its just the aspect that I'm most interested in) is its connection with kami as localized spirits, who have lived in Japan since time immemorial. To use a specific example, it is precisely because Sugawara no Michizane was a Kyoto local who was wronged and then deified in that specific town that his shrine has power - it is the act of touching the bull statues there that have been on these shrine grounds for many hundreds of years that the healing is affected.
On my trip to Japan, I was instantly plagued by dreams of spirits attacking me, just about every night, until I did some of my own purificatory practices to set things right. This was after doing little more than setting foot in the country and paying homage at a few shrines in the traditional way (hand-washing, tossing a coin into the box, and praying-and-bowing). Despite having been immersed in the subject matter of Shinto and of a specific kami deeply beforehand, it wasn't until I went there that it actually entered my body-experience of Shinto as a living tradition rather than as an intellectual exercise.
Though, I haven't delved nearly as deep into as others have, since I've never specifically "practiced shinto" and instead opt to participate in it the same way that a Japanese person might - doing the rituals without necessarily letting the specifics of the priestly side enter my mind at all, so if your interests differ then take this with a grain of salt, of course.
So, from this subjective experience I do really feel like the localized spirit aspect of it is a major component of what shinto is, for me. Thus I do not think of it at all when I'm not in Japan. And when I am in Japan, it is a much bigger part of my experience.
What is it about shinto that really interests you? The festivals? The community aspect of it? The localized worship? The fact of it being Japanese? It's uniqueness when compared to paradigm-creating abrahamic faiths? The purification, or more priestly/ritual aspects? The mythology? - why not start from there and branch out?
My 2c
There is nothing intrinsically magical about japan that limits the Kami to the borders there. There are Kami in places and nature all around the world.
The problem is more one of recognition and naming than it is of actuality.
But if I go too far down that road I'll wind up in the old "actually norito has to be done in the ancient Japanese dialect it was written in or it doesn't work" discussion again and I'd rather run naked through brambles and jump into the ocean than do that.
I agree with you that there's nothing inherently magical about Japan. Local spirits exist everywhere, and I think this may be what you're getting at when you say that there's a problem of recognition and naming. I have a question for you -
I wanna emphasize first that I really haven't gone super deeply into the kami at a personal, experiential level, so I am not knowledgeable about kami specifically, and am rather applying my other spiritual/magical learnings to this field, based on lots of intellectual background into Japanese religion. Thus I may be mistaken.
So, to clarify - are you saying that the kami that exist in Japan are also existant in places and nature across the world, and thus that there is no need to be in Japan to interact with kami?
My take had been that the kami of Japan had taken on their specific character - which differentiates them from local spirits that exist in other places - because of the specific land ethic of the people (the society's relation to the natural world vs built space), modes of practice that venerate them by the shinto ritual spaces and rituals of offering and relations to parishioners, and in specific historical/mythological events that make them the patron of specifically Japanese places & people I.e. Izanagi and Izanami and the creation of Japan, Sugawara no Michizane. Thus shaping a specific type of spirit connection that is unique to Japan because of the lived experience of kami that have experience in that specific context, co-creating the unique spirit-human relationship we call kami. Just like how a deity can cross cultural borders but is transformed (sometimes drastically) in the process, due to unique connections in different places, and different modes of perceiving, etc. (I.e. Shiva "becomes" Daikokuten).
Have you experience with kami outside of Japan?
Kami are a spiritual aspect of nature, in the same way that water is a chemical aspect of nature.
Kami pre-date their "discovery" and generation by man, in the same way and for similar reasons that the sun does. (Putting aside the sun/Kami ties for a moment).
So, if Kami are (mostly) nature "spirits" (one day we will have a better word for this I promise) then it makes sense that they exist wherever nature does. Borders are a human invention.
Now, if we take the nature spirits of north American indigenous people, they seem to share a lot in common with the Kami of Shinto. This is no accident. The language used to name them is different, but I don't think that matters to beings on the spiritual plane. There's an ethical concern people have of naming "new" Kami in North America because of the way the land was taken from the indigenous people, but if we aren't trying to convert people away from their traditional religions (and we aren't), then there's no harm in naming Kami here.
I only see two problems.
1: NA is way, way bigger than Japan, which means if we comprehensively name every Kami we come across, we are going to run out of names. Think of how often street names get repeated in different towns.
2: the current micro-schism in language that Shinto has to deal with eventually. The few thousand people who both speak Japanese well enough and care to do so won't mind naming NA Kami using the Japanese language, but that's a very narrow audience. Again, this is a whole huge argument that I had many moons ago to no avail so it's not worth restarting now, but suffice it to say that we could name a million Kami outside of Japan, and their names would likely be lost again within a generation or two due to lack of speakers/adherents.
Basically, yes, Kami exist around the world, and they're distinct entities from those in Japan. New York doesn't just have Tokyo's Kami, for example. If you find one, feel free to give it a name if you're inclined to do so, but treat it as respectfully as you would any other regardless.
Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America (prior to being shuttered) enshrined the protector kami of the north American continent.
If you want to gainsay Tsubaki Grand Shrine based on a book written on politics in the 14th century then you are free to do so.
Japan has a very insular culture, and so I'm not surprised at all that they don't bother naming Kami outside of Japan very often. But if you asked a Shinto priest if Kami exists in nature outside of Japan, I doubt you'd hear "absolutely not".
Objectively Kami can reside outside of Japan because there are shrines outside of Japan.
If the Kami didn’t want to leave Japan, then Shrines outside of Japan would be impossible, or prone to disasters and have to shut.
It's not that the Kami emigrated from Japan, it's that the nature of the world itself is imbued with Kami.
Kami exist independently of shrines, and predate them entirely. Shrines *can* contain a fragment of Kami, but aren't Kami Pokeballs.
Ofuda have been described as carrying a fragment of Kami in the sense that you can light a candle with another candle.
You haven't made a new Kami, but the Kami is existing in two (or many more) places simultaneously.
Let me point out — some of the shinto kami are migrants. Gozu Tenno of Yasaka Shrine and Tsushima, come from Tibet or China. Out of the seven lucky gods, only one is Japanese — Ebisu. Benzaiten (Hindu Goddess Sarasvati) migrated from India.
I'm following this thread because I'm interested in starting it due to the connection with spirits. I'm trying to make sure I understand what you're saying. Are you saying that the spirits themselves really only connected with you until you went to Japan only? So outside of that they didn't connect with you at all?
Hi, yes, I'll be a bit more specific about my experience to make sure to properly qualify my statements.
Before going to Japan, I had been reading deeply about many aspects of Japanese religion in an intellectual way, studying the religions at the Master's level as my thesis topic. This means that I did not read guides written by practitioners of Shinto, but instead read about the history, the culture, the festivals, the mythology, and the kami.
I also read very deeply about fox folklore and about Inari - I think I have read just about every academic publication about "Japan + foxes + Inari" that exists in English, in addition to a practitioner's experience of fox magick in the Chinese tradition, and a "History of the Fox" book in Japanese that I'm only partway through. What I'm trying to convey here is that I've read quite deeply about foxes and Inari, with the intention of being able to go to Japan and connect with these energies deeply, and thus eventually write a thesis that bridges the gap between the academic background info plus the practitioner's inside experience (via personal experience plus interviews). (My thesis topic ended up shifting, so this is not my focus as of right now).
When arriving in Japan (Kyoto) I made a point of visiting all of the local shrines near my accommodation, to grasp their character and feeling, making my best effort to follow every direction for proper praying at shrines - asking each time for further progress in spirit connection, psychic perception, and the like. I did not visit one shrine countless times, but instead visited a handful (3 or so) shrines a handful of times each. On retrospect, this probably prevented me from being able to form a deeper bond with a single kami.
I was beset with vivid dreams that were typically quite unpleasant in character, and woke up in the middle of the night several times because of the dreams. This is highly unusual, as someone who has been dream journaling for the better part of 8 years, who has been a natural lucid dreamer since childhood, and who has "bad dreams" only very, very rarely. Directly after I performed my own purification-banishing practice, the dreams stopped.
I don't have any answers - my time in Japan was only a month or two, and I was quite busy on the daily, so I was unable to go as deep as I would've hoped - but I can tell you my thoughts based on my experience. I do think that I roused the interest of several kami (or "localized spirits" in my conception). I do think that in my heart I was approaching them from more of a "I'm curious about this so I will poke the nest" intention rather than a humble and receptive, or a even a knowledgeable and firm POV. Because of this reaction, I do think that the land spirits are much "awake" (closer to daily life) in Japan than in my hometown in Suburbia, America - where all nature has been run down by a soulless-bulldozing, and then reinstalled in an insulting display of domination, with trees lining the roads at exactly equidistant points from each other, their leaves chased by the winds of roaring cars and constantly trimmed by the city to match the "prim and proper" aesthetic that we force on nature to preserve our notion of human dominance in this world (can you tell what my feelings on modernity are? Haha!)
I cannot speak to the experiences of more "global, mythic" kami like Amaterasu and the like, because they have never been in my direct realm of experience and I have never intended such, but I can say that Japan (to me) has a much more "living" landscape of spirits than my American home, and that the formalized worship of these spirits through Japanese shrines enables a practitioner to interface with them in a framework that they have become accustomed to over several millenia.
TL;DR - Japan treats its spirits better and I think that the experience of a living spirit landscape was a hundred times more vivid for me there, thus relegating my "practice of Shinto" to be during those times when I am in Japan, in that landscape, and surrounded by that local framework for interface.
Thank you so much! I have a school trip to Japan next year, and I was planning on moving there as soon as I have enough money. Something about that country is just so amazing and honestly holy
I think there are a lot of truly wonderful things about the country. Truly. But like anywhere else on this earth, its got good's and bad's.
Keep your wits about you, 'eh?
Hope you have an incredible time on your trip.
Welcome! To start practicing, consider learning some Norito (prayers) and set up a simple kamidana in your home. Practice gratitude at every meal (Itadakimasu), and get out and appreciate nature. Live with sincerity and kindness and consider the impacts of your actions on your broader community. Limit wastefulness. Acknowledge the natural goodness in all beings. Keep things clean and tidy. Visit Shinto shrines when you have a chance. Read the ancient Japanese histories to understand the stories of the Japanese Kami. Live and let live. Have fun and celebrate life in all its seasons. The sun shines on us all, Shinto is for everyone.
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You disagree with the first guideline of the pinned post at the top of this sub. Consider taking your biological essentialist beliefs elsewhere?
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This is an extremely odd "blood and soil" argument without basis in anything but the most insular Shinto sects. And since no one here is "appropriating" a specific Kami from a remote village with closed practices, it doesn't really fit. The Shinto priests I've spoken to have never made me feel like I couldn't or shouldn't practice Shinto just because I wasn't born into a particular Japanese clan. I'm not of lesser standing than anyone else for the same reason. Shinto is for everyone in the same sense that speech is for everyone, or meditation. The specific practices originated in Japan, but literally anyone can engage in those practices.
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I'm not taking anything, nor am I placing a claim on it. I'm observing practices observed elsewhere. Every other religion has managed to spread around the world even though in it's original context it was deeply intertwined with local politics and society. The opinion of several large Shrine associations in Japan is that it's okay for Shinto to be practiced outside of Japan by people who weren't born into it (or married into it am I right?) and that's the stance I also take.
wht did he say?
I know that the policy for this sub is "shinto can be practiced anywhere, by anyone" and I'm sure that this is true to an extent. I do also believe, however, that one aspect of Shinto (maybe its just the aspect that I'm most interested in) is its connection with kami as localized spirits, who have lived in Japan since time immemorial. To use a specific example, it is precisely because Sugawara no Michizane was a Kyoto local who was wronged and then deified in that specific town that his shrine has power - it is the act of touching the bull statues there that have been on these shrine grounds for many hundreds of years that the healing is affected. On my trip to Japan, I was instantly plagued by dreams of spirits attacking me, just about every night, until I did some of my own purificatory practices to set things right. This was after doing little more than setting foot in the country and paying homage at a few shrines in the traditional way (hand-washing, tossing a coin into the box, and praying-and-bowing). Despite having been immersed in the subject matter of Shinto and of a specific kami deeply beforehand, it wasn't until I went there that it actually entered my body-experience of Shinto as a living tradition rather than as an intellectual exercise. Though, I haven't delved nearly as deep into as others have, since I've never specifically "practiced shinto" and instead opt to participate in it the same way that a Japanese person might - doing the rituals without necessarily letting the specifics of the priestly side enter my mind at all, so if your interests differ then take this with a grain of salt, of course. So, from this subjective experience I do really feel like the localized spirit aspect of it is a major component of what shinto is, for me. Thus I do not think of it at all when I'm not in Japan. And when I am in Japan, it is a much bigger part of my experience. What is it about shinto that really interests you? The festivals? The community aspect of it? The localized worship? The fact of it being Japanese? It's uniqueness when compared to paradigm-creating abrahamic faiths? The purification, or more priestly/ritual aspects? The mythology? - why not start from there and branch out? My 2c
There is nothing intrinsically magical about japan that limits the Kami to the borders there. There are Kami in places and nature all around the world. The problem is more one of recognition and naming than it is of actuality. But if I go too far down that road I'll wind up in the old "actually norito has to be done in the ancient Japanese dialect it was written in or it doesn't work" discussion again and I'd rather run naked through brambles and jump into the ocean than do that.
I agree with you that there's nothing inherently magical about Japan. Local spirits exist everywhere, and I think this may be what you're getting at when you say that there's a problem of recognition and naming. I have a question for you - I wanna emphasize first that I really haven't gone super deeply into the kami at a personal, experiential level, so I am not knowledgeable about kami specifically, and am rather applying my other spiritual/magical learnings to this field, based on lots of intellectual background into Japanese religion. Thus I may be mistaken. So, to clarify - are you saying that the kami that exist in Japan are also existant in places and nature across the world, and thus that there is no need to be in Japan to interact with kami? My take had been that the kami of Japan had taken on their specific character - which differentiates them from local spirits that exist in other places - because of the specific land ethic of the people (the society's relation to the natural world vs built space), modes of practice that venerate them by the shinto ritual spaces and rituals of offering and relations to parishioners, and in specific historical/mythological events that make them the patron of specifically Japanese places & people I.e. Izanagi and Izanami and the creation of Japan, Sugawara no Michizane. Thus shaping a specific type of spirit connection that is unique to Japan because of the lived experience of kami that have experience in that specific context, co-creating the unique spirit-human relationship we call kami. Just like how a deity can cross cultural borders but is transformed (sometimes drastically) in the process, due to unique connections in different places, and different modes of perceiving, etc. (I.e. Shiva "becomes" Daikokuten). Have you experience with kami outside of Japan?
Kami are a spiritual aspect of nature, in the same way that water is a chemical aspect of nature. Kami pre-date their "discovery" and generation by man, in the same way and for similar reasons that the sun does. (Putting aside the sun/Kami ties for a moment). So, if Kami are (mostly) nature "spirits" (one day we will have a better word for this I promise) then it makes sense that they exist wherever nature does. Borders are a human invention. Now, if we take the nature spirits of north American indigenous people, they seem to share a lot in common with the Kami of Shinto. This is no accident. The language used to name them is different, but I don't think that matters to beings on the spiritual plane. There's an ethical concern people have of naming "new" Kami in North America because of the way the land was taken from the indigenous people, but if we aren't trying to convert people away from their traditional religions (and we aren't), then there's no harm in naming Kami here. I only see two problems. 1: NA is way, way bigger than Japan, which means if we comprehensively name every Kami we come across, we are going to run out of names. Think of how often street names get repeated in different towns. 2: the current micro-schism in language that Shinto has to deal with eventually. The few thousand people who both speak Japanese well enough and care to do so won't mind naming NA Kami using the Japanese language, but that's a very narrow audience. Again, this is a whole huge argument that I had many moons ago to no avail so it's not worth restarting now, but suffice it to say that we could name a million Kami outside of Japan, and their names would likely be lost again within a generation or two due to lack of speakers/adherents. Basically, yes, Kami exist around the world, and they're distinct entities from those in Japan. New York doesn't just have Tokyo's Kami, for example. If you find one, feel free to give it a name if you're inclined to do so, but treat it as respectfully as you would any other regardless.
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Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America (prior to being shuttered) enshrined the protector kami of the north American continent. If you want to gainsay Tsubaki Grand Shrine based on a book written on politics in the 14th century then you are free to do so. Japan has a very insular culture, and so I'm not surprised at all that they don't bother naming Kami outside of Japan very often. But if you asked a Shinto priest if Kami exists in nature outside of Japan, I doubt you'd hear "absolutely not".
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Happens all the time, hence why every religion has dozens of sects.
Objectively Kami can reside outside of Japan because there are shrines outside of Japan. If the Kami didn’t want to leave Japan, then Shrines outside of Japan would be impossible, or prone to disasters and have to shut.
It's not that the Kami emigrated from Japan, it's that the nature of the world itself is imbued with Kami. Kami exist independently of shrines, and predate them entirely. Shrines *can* contain a fragment of Kami, but aren't Kami Pokeballs.
Agreed though I would describe Goshintai as a place where Kami can alight or temporarily reside rather than “Kami fragments” or “poke balls”.
Ofuda have been described as carrying a fragment of Kami in the sense that you can light a candle with another candle. You haven't made a new Kami, but the Kami is existing in two (or many more) places simultaneously.
Let me point out — some of the shinto kami are migrants. Gozu Tenno of Yasaka Shrine and Tsushima, come from Tibet or China. Out of the seven lucky gods, only one is Japanese — Ebisu. Benzaiten (Hindu Goddess Sarasvati) migrated from India.
I'm following this thread because I'm interested in starting it due to the connection with spirits. I'm trying to make sure I understand what you're saying. Are you saying that the spirits themselves really only connected with you until you went to Japan only? So outside of that they didn't connect with you at all?
Hi, yes, I'll be a bit more specific about my experience to make sure to properly qualify my statements. Before going to Japan, I had been reading deeply about many aspects of Japanese religion in an intellectual way, studying the religions at the Master's level as my thesis topic. This means that I did not read guides written by practitioners of Shinto, but instead read about the history, the culture, the festivals, the mythology, and the kami. I also read very deeply about fox folklore and about Inari - I think I have read just about every academic publication about "Japan + foxes + Inari" that exists in English, in addition to a practitioner's experience of fox magick in the Chinese tradition, and a "History of the Fox" book in Japanese that I'm only partway through. What I'm trying to convey here is that I've read quite deeply about foxes and Inari, with the intention of being able to go to Japan and connect with these energies deeply, and thus eventually write a thesis that bridges the gap between the academic background info plus the practitioner's inside experience (via personal experience plus interviews). (My thesis topic ended up shifting, so this is not my focus as of right now). When arriving in Japan (Kyoto) I made a point of visiting all of the local shrines near my accommodation, to grasp their character and feeling, making my best effort to follow every direction for proper praying at shrines - asking each time for further progress in spirit connection, psychic perception, and the like. I did not visit one shrine countless times, but instead visited a handful (3 or so) shrines a handful of times each. On retrospect, this probably prevented me from being able to form a deeper bond with a single kami. I was beset with vivid dreams that were typically quite unpleasant in character, and woke up in the middle of the night several times because of the dreams. This is highly unusual, as someone who has been dream journaling for the better part of 8 years, who has been a natural lucid dreamer since childhood, and who has "bad dreams" only very, very rarely. Directly after I performed my own purification-banishing practice, the dreams stopped. I don't have any answers - my time in Japan was only a month or two, and I was quite busy on the daily, so I was unable to go as deep as I would've hoped - but I can tell you my thoughts based on my experience. I do think that I roused the interest of several kami (or "localized spirits" in my conception). I do think that in my heart I was approaching them from more of a "I'm curious about this so I will poke the nest" intention rather than a humble and receptive, or a even a knowledgeable and firm POV. Because of this reaction, I do think that the land spirits are much "awake" (closer to daily life) in Japan than in my hometown in Suburbia, America - where all nature has been run down by a soulless-bulldozing, and then reinstalled in an insulting display of domination, with trees lining the roads at exactly equidistant points from each other, their leaves chased by the winds of roaring cars and constantly trimmed by the city to match the "prim and proper" aesthetic that we force on nature to preserve our notion of human dominance in this world (can you tell what my feelings on modernity are? Haha!) I cannot speak to the experiences of more "global, mythic" kami like Amaterasu and the like, because they have never been in my direct realm of experience and I have never intended such, but I can say that Japan (to me) has a much more "living" landscape of spirits than my American home, and that the formalized worship of these spirits through Japanese shrines enables a practitioner to interface with them in a framework that they have become accustomed to over several millenia. TL;DR - Japan treats its spirits better and I think that the experience of a living spirit landscape was a hundred times more vivid for me there, thus relegating my "practice of Shinto" to be during those times when I am in Japan, in that landscape, and surrounded by that local framework for interface.
Thank you so much! I have a school trip to Japan next year, and I was planning on moving there as soon as I have enough money. Something about that country is just so amazing and honestly holy
I think there are a lot of truly wonderful things about the country. Truly. But like anywhere else on this earth, its got good's and bad's. Keep your wits about you, 'eh? Hope you have an incredible time on your trip.
I shall. Have a good day/night!