Shinto and Japanese religion

Shinto is the indigenous spiritual tradition of Japan, centered on the kami — sacred presences that inhabit natural phenomena, ancestors, and the divine forces that sustain and animate life. It has no founding figure, no sacred scripture in the conventional sense, and no creed — instead it is enacted in the rituals of the shrine, the festival, the purification rite, and the steady attention paid to the sacred in the ordinary world. Japanese religion is not a single thing but a living weave of Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism, and folk practice — a tradition comfortable with multiplicity in ways that monotheistic frameworks often find difficult to accommodate.