Text Copyright © David Chart 2020

All rights reserved.

David Chart asserts his moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.

Image of torii on cover © Dean Spencer. Used with permission.

Published by Mimusubi™

Kawasaki, Japan

“Mimusubi” and the Mimusubi logo are trademarks of David Chart.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

THESE TWO ESSAYS were originally published through the Mimusubi Patreon, in March 2020 (Shinto for Non-Japanese) and September 2020 (Practising Shinto Outside Japan). They have been compiled into a single file and formatted for sale as a unit, but there have been no changes to the content.

SHINTO FOR NON-JAPANESE

MOST (ALTHOUGH NOT all) of the people reading these essays are not Japanese, and most (although not all… Hi Dad!) are interested in Shinto. That naturally gives rise to questions like “Can I practise Shinto as well?” and “How can I practise Shinto?”. In this essay I’m going to do my best to answer those questions. First, I want to deal with the idea that a non-Japanese practising Shinto might be engaging in some sort of unacceptable cultural appropriation. Then I will explain why no-one can ever convert to Shinto, before discussing how non-Japanese people can practise Shinto, both within and outside Japan.

The short answer to the initial question is “yes, but there might be practical issues”. For the details, read on.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION?

In certain circles, particularly in the USA, it is currently fashionable to decry people doing things that do not belong to their own culture (where one’s “own culture” is often defined by one’s skin colour) as perpetrating “cultural appropriation”, and being racist oppressors of the other culture. This might be seen as a bar on people outside Japan practising Shinto.

I am not, in fact, completely sure what those people would say about Shinto, because I haven’t seen them address that issue specifically. If you think that they should guide your decision, you will have to ask them. I can, however, say what Japanese Shinto priests and other practitioners of Shinto would, and do, say.

If anyone can speak for Shinto as a whole, Jinja Honchō can. Jinja Honchō’s official position is that foreigners can practise Shinto. In fact, they would like to encourage them to do so whenever they visit jinja, and have hired me to prepare materials to help foreigners to pay their respects properly during such visits. Jinja Honchō takes the position that, if you visit a jinja at all, it is better for you to pay your respects, to practise Shinto there, than to simply observe, although they will not bar people who simply watch.

However, it is entirely possible that no-one can speak for Shinto as a whole. It is too diverse and localised for that. (On some political questions, Jinja Honchō does not even speak for all of its direct employees.) I have visited quite a lot of jinja in Japan, and paid my respects at all the jinja I have visited. I’ve also read quite a lot about the attitudes and activities of various jinja and priests in Jinja Shinpō. In all of that, I have encountered no-one, whether priest or adherent, who objected to non-Japanese practising Shinto. Quite the opposite, in fact. As with Jinja Honchō, all priests and adherents seem to be enthusiastic about foreigners paying their respects to the kami, particularly if they get the etiquette right.

Now, there are 20,000 Shinto priests and 80,000 jinja in Japan, and I would be astonished if there weren’t at least a few racists in that number. Thus, it is likely that there are at least a handful of Shinto priests who object to foreigners practising Shinto. My personal experience, however, includes large jinja in Tokyo, small jinja in the suburbs, jinja out in rural areas, remote jinja with ancient traditions, and ceremonies involving members of the Imperial family. All of them have been entirely positive about welcoming the participation of foreigners. Even if you find a Shinto priest with fifty generations of Shinto priests in his family tree who objects to foreigners practising Shinto, he is outweighed by all the other Shinto priests who think it is a good idea.

Thus, if you want to decide whether you may participate in Shinto based on the opinions of the people who preserve the customs, and whose ancestors have preserved them for centuries, then you may participate with a clear conscience.

CONVERSION

That said, you cannot convert to Shinto. This is because Shinto is simply not the sort of thing you can convert to. You can no more convert to Shinto than you can convert to the tea ceremony.

Shinto, or at least Jinja Shinto, the mainstream form represented by Jinja Honchō and almost all the jinja you see in Japan, is not an identity. It is an activity, and you can perform that activity while having a range of identities. In particular, Shinto priests do not mind if you have another religion. Historically, most Shinto priests were Buddhist, for example, and in the pre-War period the Catholic Church issued an official ruling that Catholics could pay their respects at jinja without committing a sin. (I am informed by one of my patrons, who is a Catholic, that this ruling is still in force.)

Shinto is something you do, rather than something you are.

Most fundamentally, Shinto is about paying respect to kami. You do that by going to a jinja and performing matsuri, from the simple etiquette of paying your respects right up to elaborate events that last weeks and have over a millennium of history. There is, of course, more to Shinto than this, but this is the heart of it.

Further, there are eight million kami, and each individual kami is only found in particular places. It is not practical to pay respect to all the kami, and no-one is expected to do so. (There are a handful of jinja that enshrine “all the kami”, including one of the sacred halls in the Imperial palace, but this is very rare.) If you live in an area, the local priest might expect you to pay your respects to the local kami from time to time, because you live in that kami’s area. Similarly, Jinja Honchō, and others, argue that all Japanese, and everyone living in Japan, should pay respect to Amaterasu Ōmikami, because she is the tutelary kami for the whole of Japan.

If you are a foreign tourist, or a foreigner who has not even visited Japan, then you do not fall into these categories, and there is no particular reason why you should honour the kami. That said, there is no problem if you want to do so. This is why Shinto priests are pleased when tourists want to pay their respects to the kami, but not bothered if they do not.

There is an old Japanese saying that kami will not curse you if you leave them alone. Unlike Christianity, where every human being is thought to have a duty to worship Christ, or Buddhism, where you are doomed to eternal reincarnation until you follow the teachings of the Buddha, Shinto does not think that anything particularly bad will happen to you if you simply avoid having anything to do with kami your whole life. The rituals assume that you can benefit from paying your respects, but failing to do so is not a problem.

On the other hand, everyone should avoid showing disrespect for the kami. In the legends, this could get you, and the whole area, cursed, and some priests probably still believe that. Even for the ones who do not, this is an important part of good manners. This is why local residents are supposed to show some respect for the kami, I think. By living in the area, you have an implicit connection to the kami, and so simply ignoring them is rude, just like simply ignoring any of your human neighbours. More importantly, it means that priests almost universally agree that, if you do visit a jinja, you should follow the rules. If you are going into a kami’s home, you should not ignore them, and certainly should not insult them.

Because Shinto is about showing respect for the kami, and the kami are many and diverse, there are, at least potentially, many different ways to practise Shinto. Historically, this seems to have been the case, but the Meiji government, in the late nineteenth century, put a lot of effort into standardising practice at jinja across Japan, and making it uniform. To a great extent, this survived into the post-war years, but there is still more variation than you might expect.

This is another reason why you cannot convert to “Shinto”. There is no central authority saying what you should do, and different jinja have different customs for honouring the kami. This is also one of the reasons why I am reluctant to describe Shinto as a religion, and there are a lot of scholars who have drawn attention to its lack of unity, some in the interests of denying that it existed before 1868. That, I think, is clearly unhelpful, because I think there is a clear religious tradition going back to Japanese prehistory, but while it is certainly possible to participate in and carry on a tradition, you cannot really “convert” to it. As I said at the beginning of this section, it is like the tea ceremony in that respect.

PRACTICE IN JAPAN

So, what if you want to practise Shinto in Japan?

If you are a tourist, no problem at all. Get Jinja Honchō’s little leaflet (the one I wrote) on the etiquette, and visit as many jinja as you like. Attend matsuri, and if the people there invite you to do something, take the opportunity. Make an offering for an omamori amulet, or for several, for you and your friends. This is the sort of participation that virtually all jinja enthusiastically welcome.

In most cases, you can ask for a more formal ceremony, where you enter the prayer hall, and the priests purify you and say a norito (prayer). The only limits there are that you need to explain what you want to the priests, who probably speak no language other than Japanese, and need to be dressed vaguely appropriately. Casual clothes are fine, but if all you have are microminiskirts and crop tops, you might find it tricky. (I always wear a suit or formal kimono, but while the priests like that, it is far from universal.)

Some jinja even arrange other events. There are some where youngish female tourists can experience being a miko, for example, and I am trying to get other jinja to organise things that tourists can participate in. The main obstacle is the language barrier.

If you live in Japan, more opportunities open up, because you are there for longer, and so things become more complex. All the opportunities that are open to tourists are also open to you, of course, and if you visit a distant region of Japan, you are, in fact, a tourist — just a domestic tourist.

However, if you are living in Japan, you have the opportunity to build relationships with particular jinja, and to overcome the language barrier by learning Japanese. (I would strongly recommend doing that if you live in Japan. You want JLPT level N1 as soon as you can manage. Level N2 is a bare minimum, and should be a high priority.)

The first relationship is with your local jinja, your Ujigamisama. If you live in an urban area, the priests or ujiko are unlikely to take the initiative, because they are used to people moving in and out of the area and paying no attention to the jinja. However, if you take the trouble to go and introduce yourself, and go frequently, the priests and ujiko are almost certain to welcome you. There is a good chance that you will be invited to participate in matsuri in some way. In a rural area, you may be expected to participate in matsuri, and find that your neighbours are a bit distant if you do not. Indeed, in that case someone may come to you and encourage you to participate, by inviting you along to the village matsuri.

If you do live in Japan and want to practise Shinto, you should find your local Ujigami Jinja, and go there. It does not matter what the kami is; that is the kami whose area you live in, and respecting that kami is a central part of Shinto. (Fortunately, the politically controversial jinja, like Yasukuni Jinja, do not have ujiko areas, so they will never be your Ujigamisama, even if you live next door to them.) I have yet to come across a single Shinto priest or practitioner who thinks it is permissible to ignore your local jinja, although everyone agrees that you can, and maybe should, respect other kami as well.

You can choose how often you visit the local jinja. I go every day if I am at home and there isn’t an extreme weather warning in effect, but that is unusual — there are other people who do the same, but not many. You should also plan to attend the annual matsuri, for a number of reasons. They are central to the practices of the jinja and of Shinto, so if you want to practise Shinto, you should go. They are an excellent opportunity to meet everyone who is closely involved with the jinja, particularly if your local jinja is not normally staffed. (Statistically, this is by far the most likely situation.) You can even volunteer to help out. Finally, they are normally a lot of fun.

If your local jinja is staffed, it is also easy to arrange more formal ceremonies for special occasions, such as shichigosan, wedding anniversaries, or the accession of a new Tennō. If it is not normally staffed, you can probably still arrange it if you have been to an annual matsuri and met the priest. They are likely to be willing to come to perform a ritual at the jinja, if you are flexible about the time and are willing to make a suitable offering. (This may vary by season; the priests of my local jinja are also responsible for seven other jinja, but for most of November they only do shichigosan at the main jinja, because they are fully booked and have no time to go to other jinja.)

While you are expected to form a relationship with your local jinja, it need not be the only one. You can choose pretty much any jinja in Japan to visit on a regular basis, as a sūkeisha (someone who venerates a jinja, but has no other link to it), and over the course of a few years you can build a good relationship with them. Being foreign actually helps with this, because it makes you memorable — no-one is wondering whether you are the same David Chart who came last year. You do have to visit the jinja to build the relationship, so you should only choose one on a small island hundreds of kilometres away from your home if you have a really good reason, like supporting communities recovering from the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Jinja Honchō believes that everyone in Japan should have some relationship with Jingū, and I would recommend at least picking up the Jingū Taima from your local jinja to honour on your kamidana, along with the ofuda from your local jinja itself. I would also recommend visiting Jingū at least once.

After that, you can choose a jinja based on anything that appeals to you. That might be the traditional description of the main kami, or a particular custom of that jinja, a particularly impressive sacred tree, or even something memorable that happened to you while you were visiting.

Relationships and communities are important in Shinto practice, and you should expect to spend years building those relationships. Traditionally, people started building the relationship when they were born, or possibly when their great-great-great-grandparents were born, so you cannot expect to build a good relationship with a jinja over a few weeks. (In my experience, this is generally true in Japan: it takes time to build relationships.)

This does raise a problem that needs to be faced. There may be matsuri in which you cannot participate, no matter how good your relationship with the jinja, because you are not a member of the right family. This is nothing to do with being foreign; someone descended from the Sengë or Amabë families, with eighty generations of Shinto priests behind them, would be equally excluded. In other cases, participation might be limited to people who have lived in the area all their lives, which you obviously haven’t.

As mentioned earlier, Shinto is not a universal religion. It is about honouring particular local kami, and different people can honour the kami in different ways. There is a lot of evidence that, in the earliest days of Shinto, only members of a particular clan were allowed to honour that clan’s kami, and while that rule has been much less strict for at least a thousand years, some matsuri are still restricted to certain groups. Even in such cases, these days there is normally a core part of the matsuri that is restricted, and other people are allowed to participate in the rest of it.

Similar considerations apply to the question of whether you can take on a formal role in a jinja. At some jinja, only people from families who have traditionally lived in the area can become ujiko, so foreigners (whether from overseas or from the next village down the road) cannot do that. Other jinja, however, will accept anyone who lives locally as an ujiko, no matter how recently they moved in. I suspect that this may, in fact, be more common in rural areas, where the trend towards depopulation makes it clear that turning anyone away will doom the jinja or the matsuri.

If you are young and female, and your local jinja employs miko, even if only around New Year, then there is a good chance that you will be able to serve as a miko if you ask. There do not tend to be formal requirements for becoming a miko (other than the “young and female” thing), so even if the jinja only takes people from local families as ujiko, the opportunity to become a temporary miko over New Year may be much more open.

What about becoming a priest? Foreigners can become Shinto priests; it has happened. There is an Austrian-born priest, although I believe he has now naturalised, and I understand that there are several priests who were born Korean, and have also naturalised. There is no formal bar.

However, you do need to speak, read, and write Japanese very well, and you will first need to convince Jinja Honchō, or some other Shinto group, to train you. If you just turn up, you will be turned down. Again, this is not because you are foreign; the same would happen to a random Japanese person. You need a recommendation from a priest in order to take the training courses, which means that you need to convince a priest that you are priest material. If you have built a relationship with a jinja, I suspect that this would be no harder for a foreigner than for a Japanese person with no family history of Shinto priests. (It is trivially easy for the children of priestly families to get this recommendation, because their parents can supply it.)

Assuming you did the training, you would still have the problem of finding somewhere to work as a priest. This is also a problem faced by Japanese new priests who are not from hereditary priestly families. First, there are a lot of hereditary priestly families. Some of them go back for over a thousand years, others for “just” a few centuries, but I suspect that most of the jinja that have resident priests have hereditary priests. That means that the number of vacancies is not that high. However, there is a slow-burning crisis with a lack of people to take over when elderly priests die, so this is a problem that can probably be overcome if you are sufficiently persistent.

Even then, you might face problems because you are foreign. There is a default assumption that foreigners, or people who just look foreign, do not know about Shinto, so people might have trouble accepting you as a genuine Shinto priest. (Women from priestly families worry about being accepted, so if you are a foreign woman, you would face both issues.) On the other hand, once people do accept that you know your stuff, they might well be very accepting, and rather proud, of their gaijin shinshoku. (Until you naturalise, at which point they will enjoy telling visitors that, no, you are not a foreigner, you’re Japanese.) Obviously, I have never done this, and to my knowledge only a handful of people ever have, so it is impossible to say anything general with any sort of authority.

One thing I can say is that, if you practise Shinto seriously as a visible ethnic minority in Japan, you will draw a lot of attention. (This doesn’t apply if you are, say, Chinese or Japanese-American, of course.) If you are getting it broadly right, the attention will be broadly positive, at least if my experience is anything to go by, but you can safely assume that people associated with the jinja are talking about you behind your back. That, however, is true wherever you are in Japan, unless you live entirely in the expat bubble. There are very, very few members of visible ethnic minorities living in Japan, so we stand out far more than members of ethnic minorities in the USA or UK. (By way of comparison, I calculated that if every black person in Japan came to live in Kawasaki, Kawasaki would still have a lower proportion of black people than any US city of comparable size. There are more white people, but we are still well under half of one percent of the population.) Shinto is not something that a lot of foreigners show a strong interest in, at least not at the moment (I am trying to change that), and so foreigners who are deeply involved in Shinto are very unusual. It is extremely common for me to be the only white person in the room at Shinto events.

To summarise this section, if you live in Japan and speak Japanese, then you can practise Shinto in exactly the same way as a Japanese person whose parents moved to Tokyo seventy years ago, but people will remember and comment on your participation in a way that the Japanese person will not experience.

PRACTICE OUTSIDE JAPAN

But what if you are outside Japan? After all, most non-Japanese are.

If you are one of the vanishingly small number of people outside Japan who has a local jinja, you can probably follow the advice in the previous section, without the need to learn to speak Japanese. However, there are very, very few active jinja outside Japan. (Hawai’i is the only place outside Japan I am aware of where you have a good chance of finding a local jinja.)

Otherwise, you face real practical problems.

For this section, I’m going to assume that you want to practise Shinto, rather than a personal brand of Shinto-influenced neo-paganism; I will discuss that in the next section.

The first, and most fundamental, problem is that the kami live in Japan. Kami are particular, they are not thought to be present everywhere, and they are not generally thought to be present in other countries unless taken there. Of course, anything can be a kami, so in theory you could treat a particularly beautiful lake in England as a kami. The problem there, however, is that if you were revering that lake with roughly Shinto ceremonies, your practice would fall into the category of Shinto-influenced neo-paganism. You would really need to be a fully qualified Shinto priest, setting up a Japanese-style jinja, for the practice to look like Shinto, and even then some people would have doubts. (Similarly, Shinto does not honour “nature” or “the sun”, so if you do that you are firmly in Shinto-influenced neo-paganism. The kami of Shinto are much more specific and particular.)

So, you need to get hold of some kami. The obvious way to do this is to get an ofuda from a jinja. These are supposed to be taken away from the jinja so that you can honour the kami remotely, and people in Japan put them on a kamidana in their home.

A kamidana is just a shelf, normally above eye level, on which you put ofuda and offerings, and before which you pay your respects, exactly as at a jinja. (Bow twice, clap twice, bow once.) You can get miniature sanctuaries to put the ofuda in, and sanbō stands to put offerings on, as well as small plates for the offerings. The standard Japanese ones are rice, sakë, water, and salt, which are also easy to get in most countries these days. You can get most of the things you need for a kamidana by mail order from Japan, although the shipping is likely to be pricey; unless you buy particularly high quality items, you can furnish a kamidana nicely for about $150.

The problem is the ofuda, and while you can have a functioning kamidana with nothing but an ofuda, if you do not have an ofuda, you do not have a kamidana, because you have no kami.

Jinja Honchō is officially opposed to ofuda being made available by mail order, even to people overseas. I have raised the issue with them, and at that time they indicated that it would be difficult to approve a solution.

The fundamental difficulty is that an ofuda is not simply an object that is sold. Its precise religious significance is a little ambiguous, as with so much in Shinto, but it is probably fair to say that the default assumption is that kami inhabit the ofuda, in much the same way that they inhabit the goshintai of a jinja. Packing them up in an envelope and dropping them in the post box seems disrespectful.

A secondary difficulty relates to the importance of place in Shinto practice. It really matters that one visits a jinja to pay one’s respects to the kami; it is simply not the case that all locations are equally good. Thus, one is supposed to visit a jinja in person to get an ofuda. If you cannot, for whatever reason, someone from the jinja can bring it to you in person.

Obviously, this poses practical problems if you are not local to the jinja. As Jinja Honchō believes that every household in Japan should have a Jingū Taima, the ofuda from Jingū at Isë, they have had to come up with a solution. In this case, almost every jinja in Japan distributes Jingū Taima, in addition to their own ofuda. Thus, even if you live in Hokkaidō, you need go no further than your local jinja. In Japan, that is never going to be very far.

However, that solution does not work outside Japan. The Shinto establishment does not really think about people practising Shinto outside Japan, and, if we are honest, there are really not many of them, so they do not demand attention. So, what can you do?

One thing you absolutely cannot do is make your own ofuda. It is true that there is a ceremony for this at the jinja, but the real problem is more fundamental. Shinto practice is to honour an ofuda from a particular jinja, not just of a particular kami. I, for example, have an ofuda from Shirahata Hachiman Daijin, which is my local jinja, and this ofuda is distinct from those from the thousands of other Hachiman jinja in Japan. An ofuda for a jinja can only be made at that jinja for the same reason that only I can make signed copies of this essay: you could print it out and write my name on it, but that would not make it a signed copy. Similarly, you could perform a ceremony to make an ofuda, but that would not make it an ofuda for any jinja. If you take this route, you are practising Shinto-influenced neo-paganism, and should see the next section.

I do have some more positive suggestions. The list below is not exhaustive, and you may come up with other options. I suggest the following test to see whether they are legitimate: does the jinja in question approve of having their ofuda distributed in this way? If you do not know and cannot find out, then the approach is probably not legitimate. This applies to pretty much anyone reselling ofuda online. If the jinja does approve, then the method is a legitimate way to get hold of that jinja’s ofuda, but might not be legitimate for anywhere else.

That said, there are some general methods that can be assumed to be legitimate.

First, you can visit Japan, go to a jinja you like, and get an ofuda to take home. This is clearly entirely legitimate; it is the normal thing to do. You are, formally, supposed to replace an ofuda every year, but priests are very reluctant to come out and say that the ofuda “expires” after a year and ceases to have any significance. An ofuda is just a piece of wood before the kami is called into it, and there is a formal ceremony for inviting the kami to leave, but that ceremony is performed after the ofuda is returned to the jinja. So, you could get an ofuda, and then keep it until you next have a chance to visit Japan. This is probably the best solution, but it does require a visit to Japan. Obviously, I recommend that, but if you live in an English-speaking country, it is not cheap.

Second, if you live in the USA, there are Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America, in Washington State, and Shinto Shrine of Shusse Inari in America, which will send you ofuda and everything else you need, from an English language web page. They will probably also ship internationally, although you should be aware that international postage from the USA is extremely expensive these days. Since the jinja are offering this service from their own websites, they clearly approve. (Jinja Honchō may not, but that is not important.) The main problem with this option is that they only offer the ofuda for their own kami, and Jingū Taima from Tsubaki Grand Shrine, so if you want to honour another kami, you are out of luck.

Third, there may be formally organised groups in your country linked to a particular jinja in Japan, and they may have systems set up to distribute ofuda. One example is the Fushimi Inari Faith International Group, which has a Facebook group, and does have a system for distributing ofuda. Again, this will limit you to particular jinja and particular kami, but as the jinja approves of the group, you can assume that this is a legitimate means of obtaining an ofuda.

Finally, you might be able to find someone in Japan who can get ofuda for you, and mail them out. This, of course, depends on having the necessary personal connection, and your acquaintance should check that the jinja is happy with them doing this. I am confident that almost all jinja would be.

In the medium term, I hope that Jinja Honchō will approve some official way to do this, organised, most likely, through groups of jinja. For now, however, this is a real practical difficulty.

Fortunately, there is another option, and this is probably the easiest. Shinto has a custom called “yōhai”, or “distant reverence”. To do this, you face towards the jinja you want to honour, and perform the normal double bow, double clap, single bow reverence. In pre-war Japan, it was very common to perform yōhai towards the Imperial palace, to honour the Tennō, and you can still find special locations for that set up in the precincts of some jinja, with a stone pillar or something indicating the appropriate direction. From overseas, orienting yourself towards Japan would be sufficient, because you cannot be accurate enough to distinguish between jinja at that distance.

However, you do need to be honouring a particular jinja. Not just a particular kami, but a particular jinja that enshrines that kami. Yōhai for Jingū is still performed on occasion, and it can be performed in the grounds of a jinja that also enshrines Amaterasu Ōmikami. This is still relatively easy: choose a jinja, and pay your respects to it. (I have written several essays about particular jinja, and I will write more.) If you do have the chance to visit Japan, you can then visit “your” jinja, and get a proper ofuda.

Obviously, if you live outside Japan and nowhere near one of the few jinja there, you simply do not have the opportunity to participate in local matsuri. This is unfortunate, but not a problem that can be solved in the short, or even medium, term.

SHINTO-INFLUENCED NEO-PAGANISM

Two questions arise about Shinto-influenced Neo-Paganism. Is it Shinto? Is it ethical?

The answer to the first question is basically “no”: Shinto-influenced neo-paganism is not Shinto. There is no core doctrine to Shinto; it consists of the traditional religious practices of Japan and the Japanese. If you are not Japanese, and not in Japan, then you start with two strikes against you when determining whether your practices are a variety of Shinto. Thus, in order for an American in America (for example) to be practising Shinto, they need to be following Shinto practices, as found in Japan, very closely. The suggestions in this essay are based on Jinja Shinto, as organised by Jinja Honchō, but there are other varieties of Shinto that you could practise outside Japan. That would not remove the need to carefully copy the Japanese practices.

One part of this is not mixing Shinto elements with elements from other pagan religions. Shinto practice in Japan does not normally honour Amaterasu and Apollo together as sun deities, so if you are doing that, you are no longer practising Shinto. There are particular mixes of Shinto and Buddhism that have a long tradition in Japan, and those are arguably versions of Shinto, but that does not apply to a mix of Shinto and Buddhism that you have made up.

So, if it is important to you to practise Shinto, then you need to match Japanese practice. You can practise other religions as well — that itself is part of Japanese practice. However, you do need to practise them separately.

The second question is really about whether it matters if your practice is not Shinto. Shinto does not claim a monopoly on truth, or that it is the only way to honour the kami, so in that sense it does not matter. (I want to leave aside the question of what the kami really want, as it is far too big, fundamental, and difficult.) One sense in which it might matter is that of cultural appropriation.

As mentioned earlier, if you are practising Shinto, then Shinto priests in general are enthusiastic about you doing so. No matter how concerned you are about cultural appropriation, you can practise Shinto with a clear conscience.

Things are nothing like as straightforward if you are practising Shinto-influenced neo-paganism. Even in Japan, there are people who do not follow the standard etiquette at jinja, even when they are honouring the kami. As a rule, priests tolerate this, but it seems to be common for them to not like it, and to look for ways to get these people to follow the established ways of honouring the kami.

Thus, incorporating Shinto elements into neo-pagan practice might well count as cultural appropriation. If that bothers you, you should avoid doing so.

STUDYING SHINTO

It is also, of course, possible to study Shinto. I know of rather more non-Japanese who study Shinto to a high level than who practise it, in fact. However, the two activities are clearly distinct. These essays are one way to study Shinto, but if you want to study the subject seriously, you have to learn Japanese and, ultimately, you will find it easiest if you move to Japan, because the materials are more easily available.

Just as with Shinto practice, every Shinto priest I have encountered is enthusiastic about foreigners studying Shinto. If you can speak Japanese, most of them are keen to talk to you about it, and are quite likely to say that you know more about Shinto than they do. (This is supposed to be a genuine compliment, despite its lack of plausibility. The priests who have not said that to me were both professors of Shinto Studies; it would indeed sound rather silly were they to do so.)

The overall message of this essay is that, if you want to practise Shinto, the overwhelming majority of Shinto priests are enthusiastically in favour of your doing so, particularly during any time you might spend in Japan. Practising Shinto outside Japan is only different in that the practical problems are larger, and you inevitably miss out on a lot. You are welcome to practise it if you wish.

PRACTISING SHINTO OUTSIDE JAPAN

THIS ESSAY IS (intended to be) a detailed, practical guide to doing Shinto outside Japan. I assume that you have decided to practise Shinto, and that you live outside Japan, are not Japanese, and do not speak Japanese.

If you have not yet decided that you want to practise Shinto, seeing what is involved may be helpful, but I am not going to say much, if anything, about why you might want to practise it. My other essays will give you more of an idea of what Shinto is like, and thus whether it is attractive to you.

If you live in Japan, you should not follow the guidelines in this essay. You should go to your local jinja, and get involved with the practice there. There will probably be a lot of similarities to what I recommend, but if you have a local jinja, its practices take priority. (This also applies if you happen to live near to Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America, Shinto Shrine of Shusse Inari in America, or any other Shinto jinja outside Japan.)

If you are Japanese, but live outside Japan and do not speak Japanese, then you can follow this advice as written, but probably have contacts in Japan that will make certain things a bit easier, or give you obvious options for certain choices.

If you speak, read, and write Japanese, then you can follow the advice in this essay, but you also have access to a lot more information, and so can find other practices that are still Shinto without too much difficulty. Of course, most of that information will assume that you are in Japan, so this essay might still be useful.

This essay is entirely about ritual practices. It has nothing to say about ethics, or other things you should do with your life. This is because Shinto is primarily concerned with the rituals performed to honour the kami, and so that is where you should start.

Before we do start, I need to make a very important point. This essay describes practices that are clearly Shinto, so that if you do these things, you are doing Shinto, no matter where you live or what your background is. However, these are not the only things that you could do outside Japan to practise Shinto. Further, there are other practices in Japan that are also clearly Shinto. People who are doing things differently are not necessarily doing it wrong.

On the other hand, there are things you could do that are not Shinto, even though they might look like they should be. Since I am assuming that you want to practise Shinto, and not something else, I am offering a safe set of practices. They are based as closely as possible on the standards set by Jinja Honchō, which is the largest and most mainstream Shinto organisation in Japan, and also the one that I work for. This means that no-one involved with Shinto in Japan would think that these practices were weird, although some groups would do things differently.

These practices, then, are a safe starting point, but they are very far from being the whole of Shinto.

CHOOSE A JINJA

The first thing that you need to do is to choose a jinja to venerate. Note that you need to choose a jinja, not a kami. Even when the same kami is enshrined at more than one jinja, which is common, you venerate the kami at a particular jinja. You can choose more than one jinja, and, in fact, the standard rule in Japan is to venerate at least two, and normally three or more. You can even venerate more than one jinja that enshrines the same kami, and those venerations are separate from each other.

Jinja Honchō says that everyone should primarily venerate Jingū, at Isë, because Amaterasu Ōmikami is the general tutelary kami for all Japanese and everyone who lives in Japan. However, I am assuming that you are neither Japanese, nor live in Japan. In that case, Jinja Honchō has never presented any argument as to why you should venerate Jingū, probably because your existence did not cross their minds.

That said, you certainly can choose Jingū if you want, and it is a reasonable choice. It has an English web page, and quite a lot of information is available in English. Furthermore, you can get Jingū Taima, the ofuda for Jingū, from Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America.

The standard second choice in Japan is your Ujigami Jinja, the local tutelary jinja for the area where you live. My assumption is that you do not have one, but if you have family connections to a particular area in Japan, the Ujigami Jinja for that area would be a very appropriate choice. If you still have connections living in the area, you might be able to get the ofuda through them. Otherwise, this standard is of little use to you, and you can simply ignore it.

It is worth emphasising that, in mainstream Shinto practice in Japan, you have no choice about the first two jinja you venerate: they must be Jingū and your Ujigami Jinja. (You could change the Ujigami Jinja by moving house, but that is the only way to do it.)

However, many people in Japan venerate three or more jinja, and Jinja Honchō encourages this. These jinja are called “sūkei jinja”. You can choose these however you like, and so people living outside Japan are, effectively, simply choosing one or more sūkei jinja.

If you live in the continental USA, then Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America and Shinto Shrine of Shusse Inari in America are both good choices. They have English websites, and will ship ofuda and omamori to you. It will also be easier for you to visit the jinja in person at some point. It could also be argued that these are the nearest equivalent to an Ujigami Jinja for people in your position.

Although you primarily venerate a jinja rather than a kami, it is common to choose a jinja because you like the main kami enshrined there. Most jinja enshrine more than one kami, and some famous kami are actually more than one kami. The most important example is Hachiman Ōkami, who is (normally) Homudawakë no Mikoto, Okinagatarashihimë no Mikoto, and Tamayorihimë no Mikoto. This means that, if you choose a jinja based on one of the kami, you may well get other kami as part of a “package deal”. That might be something that influences your choice of jinja, if you can find out enough about which kami are enshrined there.

It is probably even more common to choose a jinja because it is famous for a particular kind of benefit. Kinkazan Koganëyama Jinja (“Gold Flower Mountain Gold Mountain Jinja”) in Miyagi Prefecture is famous for financial benefits, and according to the jinja’s story, if you visit three times in three consecutive years, you will never suffer financial hardship. (This is one of my sūkei jinja, and I visit every year. The man who takes me across to the island has asked me whether it is working. So far, so good…) Tokyo Daijingū is famous for “enmusubi”, which in this case means finding a good marriage partner, and not because its main kami is Amaterasu Ōmikami. (Jingū is not famous for enmusubi, despite having the same main kami.) Kitanotenmangū is famous for academic success, because its main kami is Tenjin-sama, who was the famous scholar Sugawara no Michizanë.

Finally, people often choose a jinja because they have some sort of hard-to-explain link to it. That is how I chose Kinkazan Koganëyama Jinja; I visited several jinja to pray for the recovery of the area in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake, but that was the one that stuck. Thus, it is entirely reasonable to choose a jinja because you saw a beautiful photograph of it online, or because you visited it while you were in Japan and really liked the sacred tree in the grounds.

In the case of the audience for this essay, the quality of the jinja’s English website is also a reasonable standard. As far as I know, there is no centralised collection of such links at the moment, although I have suggested that Jinja Honchō make this a feature of their English website. However, stumbling across a jinja’s English website and being impressed would fall into the “hard-to-explain link” category, and thus also be a good reason for making a choice.

If you want to practise Shinto, but cannot come up with any particular jinja, then Jingū is a good place to start.

OFUDA

One of the most important items in household Shinto practice is the ofuda. An ofuda is a wooden or paper plaque received from a jinja, normally with the name of the kami or jinja written on it in black, and the jinja’s seal impressed on it in red. They come in various sizes, from about 20 cm long to about 50 cm, but somewhere around 30 cm is most common. This item is generally thought to be a vessel for the kami enshrined in the jinja; the kami are treated as being present in the ofuda, and reverence is performed before it.

You cannot make your own ofuda; it has to come from the jinja you are venerating. What is more, you should only get it through a method that the jinja approves of. If the jinja offers to ship the ofuda from its website, then that is fine, but it is not a good idea to go through people advertising online that they can get whatever ofuda you want, especially if you cannot read Japanese and thus cannot check that you actually got the right one.

As mentioned earlier, the jinja based in the USA ship their ofuda, and you can also get Jingū Taima, the ofuda for Jingū, from Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America. This is also fine, as Jingū has a general agreement with other jinja in Japan, organised through Jinja Honchō, to distribute its ofuda more widely. In other cases, however, you probably have to visit the jinja in person, or ask someone you know personally to get the ofuda on your behalf.

If you do get ofuda, you should try to replace them once a year, at around New Year’s. This is not absolutely compulsory, but it is a good idea if you can. Of course, living outside Japan makes this harder, and so you might not be able to get a new ofuda anything like that often.

It might be practically impossible for you to get an ofuda for the jinja you have chosen. In that case, you should perform yōhai, which means “distant reverence”, and does not require an ofuda. If you can get an ofuda, you should set up a kamidana. It is better to have a kamidana if possible, but relying on yōhai is better than getting an ofuda illegitimately.

PREPARING FOR REVERENCE

The conventional advice is to venerate the kami in your home twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. My impression is that very few people actually do this. If you do it once per day, you will already be doing it more often than most Japanese people who think of themselves as practising Shinto. It is certainly fine to miss a day, and there is no particular time of day when it should be done, so you can establish your own habits. A reasonable minimum is twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. (On the old calendar, these were the days of the new and full moon, respectively, so those would also be good choices.) However, if you are basically venerating the kami every day, there is no problem if you happen to miss one of these days.

Whether you are going to pay reverence to the kami at a kamidana or by yōhai, there are some common preparations you should make.

First, you should be clean. For personal ceremonies, you do not need to get washed specially, unless you actually feel dirty. If you’ve just been digging the garden, for example, you should probably wash first.

Second, you should be properly dressed. That doesn’t necessarily mean a suit; it just means that you should dress as you would to visit someone you respected. Your clothes should express respect for the kami in the same way that you would dress to express respect for a person. For these purposes, your standards matter. (When visiting a jinja, their standards matter, but we are talking about your personal practices.)

Third, you should purify yourself. You should do this in the place where you are going to pay reverence.

Stand up straight, then bow deeply, twice. You should keep your legs straight and bow as far towards ninety degrees as you can manage. (If you’ve seen the video I did on YouTube — not like that. Keep your legs straight. Otherwise you look like Mr Bean. I’m working on it.) Hold each bow for a few seconds before straightening up, and, similarly, pause for a second or two between the bows.

Bow your head, or bow slightly from the waist, and recite a purification (haraë) prayer. The shortest one is very short, and probably the best choice if you intend to do this every day:

Haraë tamai, kiyomë tamaë

This means “I ask that you purify and cleanse me”. You should recite it aloud, but you may do so quietly, and I believe that most people do.

If you want to recite a slightly longer one, then the standard haraëkotoba is as follows:

Kakëmakumo kashikoki Izanagi no Ōkami

Tsukushi no Himuga no Tachibana no Odo no Awagihara ni

Misogiharaë tamaishi toki ni narimaseru

Haraëdo no Ōkamitachi

Moromoro no Magagoto, Tsumikegarë aramuoba

Haraë tamai Kiyomë tamae

To mōsu koto o

Kikoshimesë to

Kashikomi Kashikomi mo Mōsu

This means “Oh kami of haraë, born when Izanagi no Ōkami, whose very name it is fearful to utter, performed misogiharaë at the Awagihara of Tachibana bay in Himuga in Tsukushi [Southeastern Kyūshū], whatever misfortune or tsumikegarë there may be, we most humbly and fearfully pray that you hear our entreaty to purify and cleanse it”.

This is the purification prayer that is normally offered at a jinja before a matsuri.

The purification prayers, and the other prayers that you recite later during the reverence itself, should be recited in Japanese. There are two reasons for this. The first is that people practising Shinto in Japan recite them in Japanese, and so reciting them in Japanese makes it more certain that you are actually practising Shinto. The second is that there is a common belief in Shinto that the words themselves have power; this is the belief in kotodama. This is why many prayers in Japan are written in classical Japanese, as it was spoken a thousand years ago, and use phrases that were used in ancient norito, even if people today are unsure what they mean. Thus, while I have provided translations, it does not matter if you do not fully understand how the Japanese words match up with the meanings.

“Good enough” Japanese pronunciation is very easy for native English speakers, because English includes almost all the sounds in Japanese, and there are a lot of pronunciation guides available online. A quick web search should turn up something with recordings and hints.

Once you have done this, you are ready to pay reverence to the kami.

What if you cannot perform the standard actions, for example because you cannot stand up for that long? In that case, it is entirely acceptable to approximate as best you can. People do perform reverence while seated, and if you are unable to move at all, you can go through the whole thing in your head. You should, however, do as much as you can, and practise to improve insofar as that is possible.

YŌHAI

If you have no ofuda, you should perform yōhai. This can be performed anywhere, indoors or out, although it should be a quiet area where no-one will disturb you, and you won’t disturb anyone.

Face towards the jinja you are venerating. If you are in the continental USA, this means “face west”, while if you are in Europe, it means “face east”, because the jinja is in Japan, and at 10,000 km distance, you cannot really be much more precise than that. (I am going to say that you should face the jinja according to a line running along the earth’s surface, because if we use a straight line as the basis, people in Brazil would be lying face down on the floor, which would be silly. This does, of course, mean that for every jinja there is some location where it does not matter which way you face.)

After you have purified yourself, bow very slightly. You start paying reverence to the kami with this slight bow, so from this point, until the reverence finishes, you should pay attention to how you are acting.

Take three steps forward.

Bow to about 45º.

Stand up straight, and pause for a couple of seconds.

Bow deeply twice.

Stand up straight, and pause for a couple of seconds.

Bow your head, or bow slightly from the waist, and recite the following prayer, with your head still down:

Kakëmakumo kashikoki [insert jinja name] no ōmaë o haruka ni orogami matsuritë kashikomi kashikomi mōsaku,

Ōkamitachi no hiroki atsuki mimëgumi o katajikënami matsuri

Takaki tōtoki mioshië no manimani naoki tadashiki magokoro mochitë makoto no michi ni tagau koto naku

Oimotsu waza ni hagëmashimë tamai

Iëkado takaku misukoyaka ni

Yo no tamë hito no tamë ni tsukusashimë tamaë to

Kashikomi kashikomi mo mōsu

This means, line by line:

As I venerate the kami of [jinja], whose name it is fearful even to utter, from a distant place, I pray that

I may humbly offer up the broad and deep blessings of kami with deep awe,

I may follow the true path without straying, in accordance with the high and noble teachings of the kami, bearing an honest, true, and sincere heart

Give me energy for the work I do,

Raise up my household in health,

And enable me to give my all for the world and for other people.

I most humbly and reverently so pray.

Where it says [insert jinja name], you should insert the name of the jinja. Strictly speaking, that should be the formal Japanese name of the jinja, which in the case of Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America is “America Tsubaki Ōkami Yashiro” (assuming they read their name in the same way as the parent jinja in Japan). However, if you cannot find the formal Japanese name, or, even more likely, the formal ancient-Japanese style reading of the formal Japanese name, it is perfectly all right to use the name that you have, even if that has some English in it. My local jinja should really be “Shirahata Yawata Ōkami” in prayers, but most people call it “Shirahata Hachiman Daijin”, and that is no problem.

When you have finished reciting the prayer, stand up straight again, and pay reverence.

First, bow deeply twice.

Stand up straight again.

Put your hands together in front of your chest, at about shoulder height. Slide the right hand down slightly so that the tips of the fingers are around the first joint of the fingers on your left hand. Clap twice, loudly, opening your hands to the width of your chest before clapping them. (They shouldn’t go much out beyond your body, but you do not have to be perfectly precise.) After the second clap, leave your hands together and slide the right hand back up, so that the fingers of both hands align. Then put your arms down by your sides.

Bow deeply once.

Stand up straight, and pause for a few seconds.

Bow once, down to about 45º, and straighten up.

Take three steps backwards. You should actually walk backwards, looking towards the kami.

Bow slightly, once.

That marks the end of the reverence, and you do not need to worry about your actions after that.

Finally, a few explanatory or supplementary notes.

The norito given here is a combination of the standard norito for yōhai, and the standard norito for use at a kamidana. It is for a single jinja. If you are venerating multiple jinja, I think it is safest to repeat the whole reverence, as described above, rather than trying to venerate several distant locations at the same time. You do not need to repeat the purification, so simply do the above, and then start again for the second jinja, and the third, if necessary.

If you have little time, you can use the basic yōhai prayer instead of the more elaborate one given above:

Kakëmakumo kashikoki [insert jinja name] no ōmaë o haruka ni orogami matsuraku to mōsu.

I venerate the kami of [jinja], which it is fearful even to name, from a great distance.

If you are performing yōhai for several jinja, you might want to use the abbreviated form for most of them.

You may have noticed that there are no offerings involved. This is correct. One does not normally make offerings during a yōhai, because the kami is not present to receive them.

Yōhai is often performed at the time of a major matsuri that one is unable to attend. During the pandemic, some jinja livestreamed their major matsuri so that people could watch them, and perform yōhai. If you can find out when your jinja’s major matsuri are, it would be appropriate to perform yōhai on those days, at the time when the matsuri is being performed. Do not forget about the time difference! Japan is on UTC+9, and has no summer time, which means that it is nine hours ahead of the UK in the winter, and eight hours ahead in the summer. It is not important to get the timing exactly right, especially if you cannot find an English reference to the time when the matsuri is performed, but ideally it should be daylight on the correct day in Japan when you do it.

In this case, you should use a slightly different prayer:

Kakëmakumo kashikoki [insert jinja name] ni kyō [insert matsuri name] okonai tamau ga yuë ni ōmaë o haruka ni orogami matsuraku to mōsu.

As [matsuri] is being performed today at [jinja], which it is fearful even to name, I venerate the kami from a great distance.

It would be appropriate to perform this kind of yōhai even if you have a kamidana, although most people in Japan do not. For their local jinja, of course, that is because they actually go to the jinja for the matsuri. As you cannot attend the jinja very often, this would give you a good link to its ritual year, and thus might be a good idea. Of course, if the jinja does not list its main matsuri on its English website, you may be out of luck.

KAMIDANA

If you can get an ofuda for at least one of your jinja, then you can set up a kamidana. This is the ideal situation. If you have an ofuda for some jinja but not others, then you can honour the jinja for which you have ofuda at your kamidana, and perform yōhai for the others.

For a kamidana, there are two aspects: setting up the physical space, and venerating the kami there. I will deal with each aspect in its own section.

THE PHYSICAL KAMIDANA

“Kamidana” means “kami shelf”, and that succinctly expresses the two essential elements of a kamidana: kami, in one or more ofuda, and a shelf to put them on. That is all you need, and the shelf can be extremely small, little bigger than the ofuda and fixed to the wall. The important point is that the ofuda must be standing on the shelf, not lying down, and must not be pinned or fastened to the wall or a surface. Stand the ofuda so that the surface with the writing on is facing away from the wall; imagine that the kami are looking out of that side.

You can arrange ofuda next to each other, or one in front of another, with those in front leaning on those behind. The latter arrangement might sound disrespectful, but it is actually the more common, because it takes less space. If the ofuda are arranged one in front of another, the most important goes in front, with the next most important behind it, and so on, so that the least important is at the back. If they are arranged side-by-side, the most important one goes in the middle, with the next to the right as you look at them (to the left, from the kami’s perspective), the next to the other side of the central one (your left, the kami’s right), the next further out to the right, the next further out to the left, and so on. It is also possible to combine these, and this is common. According to Jinja Honchō, the Jingū Taima is always the most important ofuda, and the ofuda from your Ujigamisama is next. The sūkei jinja ofuda come after that. When ofuda are lined up next to each other, it is common to have three “slots”, so if someone has more than one sūkei jinja, those ofuda are stacked in front of each other.

If you have multiple ofuda, you have to decide on a status order. The standard rules are likely to be no help: you have no Ujigamisama, and may have no Jingū Taima. If you asked the priests at a jinja, they would probably say that their jinja’s ofuda should be in the position of greatest honour. They are, after all, priests at that jinja. This is something you will have to decide for yourself, depending on your feelings about the jinja and the kami. Note that I am not aware of people changing the order of the ofuda on some sort of cycle; the status of the jinja is normally taken to be fixed.

The other features of a kamidana are all nice to have, but none of them are essential, and there is no particular order of importance. You can add them as you find space and funds, or do the whole thing at once. In addition, and also unlike ofuda, they do not have to be replaced on any fixed schedule.

The kamidana should be in a bright and clean room that people use, and ideally the kami should face either east or south. However, if the shape of the room makes that difficult, it is fine to have them face another direction.

An ideal kamidana shelf is a separate shelf, slightly above eye level, connected to the ceiling by a frame with a top level carved to resemble clouds. However, these days most people in Japan cannot manage that (they often do not fit in western-style rooms), so do not worry if you have to compromise a bit. The shelf should be quite high, but not so high that it is difficult to manipulate the things standing on it, as it is necessary to do things there while performing the reverence. If you need to compromise, go in favour of accessibility, but do try to avoid having the shelf below chest level. The idea is that you should not be looking down on the kami.

Another aspect of the same idea is that nobody should walk over the top of the kami. If the kamidana is on the top (inhabited) floor of the building, this is no problem. If you control the floors above as well, then people recommend putting immobile pieces of furniture, like wardrobes and bookcases, directly over the kamidana, so that people will not walk there. Alternatively, you can stick a piece of paper with the Japanese kanji for “clouds” (雲 — search for “kumo kanji” online to get larger models) on the ceiling, with the kanji visible. It is perfectly acceptable to write this yourself, and unless you are ordering one with something else from Japan, postage is likely to be absurdly expensive for what it is.

The furnishings of a kamidana have, in general, no inherent spiritual significance. That means that you can get them from anywhere you like, and even make them yourself if you are that way inclined. They are a way of expressing respect for the kami, but it is perfectly acceptable for them to be simple. I would recommend avoiding plastic items, because that is not at all traditional, but even that is not an absolute rule.

There are a lot of places that sell these items. Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America may be a good choice, as they have everything that you need. The prices are reasonable; you can get cheaper ones, but their offerings are not particularly expensive, and do not need to be shipped from Japan. (They do need to be shipped from the USA; if you are not in the USA, shipping from Japan is probably cheaper, even if you live in Canada.) I got the furnishings for my kamidana from Ise Miya-chū, a company in Isë. They are expensive, but they have literally everything, and the quality is high. I believe they ship outside Japan, but all of their customer service is in Japanese. They do have a lot of very nice photographs on their site, which might be worth browsing. The easiest option with the widest choice may well be Amazon Japan. If you want to see something of the range of what is available, go to Amazon Japan (amazon.co.jp) and search for 神棚 (you should be able to just copy and paste those characters). There is a wide range of items available, and Amazon normally ships overseas without any trouble. (There may be some sellers that do not.) In addition, if you scroll down to the bottom of the screen, you can set the language to English. Most of the product descriptions will still be in Japanese, but all the business aspects of the site get translated, which will make ordering a lot easier. In the end, it does not really matter where you get the furnishings.

My recommendation for the first thing to get would be a proper stand or miyagata for the ofuda. Stands are what they sound like: wooden stands to support the ofuda so that you do not need to lean them against the wall. A lot of jinja in Japan will give you one free when you receive an ofuda, but you are likely to need to buy one. The simple versions, fortunately, are not expensive, and would be easy to make for anyone with any woodworking skills. The more complex versions are like miniature jinja sanctuaries, with thatched roofs, three chambers for the ofuda, and gilded fittings. Those can cost about $3,000, and would need a large shelf. I would not recommend starting with one of those unless you have a lot of spare money.

Once you have somewhere to put the ofuda, the next priority is vessels for the offerings. You can get a standard set from a wide range of places. This includes two bottles with lids for sake, a plate for rice, a plate for salt, and a nearly spherical cup with a peaked lid for water. These are almost always in white ceramic. The set often includes a sanbō or oshiki, a wooden tray that the offerings are placed on before they are placed before the kami. (An oshiki is a roughly square or rectangular tray with the corners “cut off” so that it has eight sides, four of them very short, and a raised rim. A sanbō is a square oshiki on a smaller, but tall, square base with holes in three sides. “Sanbō” means “three sides”; historically, there were “nihō” with holes in two sides, but only the sanbō is common today.)

This, however, is something you could substitute for. You should not really use the plates used on your kamidana for anything other than offerings to the kami, but you could use any items you had bought specially. Similarly, it is a good idea to put the offerings on a wooden tray, rather than directly on the kamidana, but the tray does not have to be of the traditional form.

The final piece of basic furniture is two sakaki branches, one either side of the ofuda. These are normally placed in white ceramic vases, and, again, these are easy to get, but are not at all fixed in design. You could easily use a pair of simple, and fairly small, vases bought at any shop. The larger problem is the sakaki itself. This is an evergreen shrub that is very closely associated with Shinto, but it only grows in east Asia. Getting actual sakaki outside Japan is likely to be impractically difficult.

There are two options. First, you can get artificial sakaki, and put that on your kamidana. This is fairly common in Japan as well, because it saves trouble. People do not replace the sakaki every day, which means that in summer it tends to die before you can put new ones in. Artificial sakaki does not have that problem. You would probably have to get it shipped from Japan, but Amazon Japan has it.

The second option is to use a broad-leaf evergreen that is local to your area. This has precedent: sakaki does not grow in the far north of Japan, and jinja in that area use something local.

There are other things that you can also have on a kamidana, such as a pair of lamps, a circular metal mirror in the centre, a shimënawa over the top, and even little koma inu or foxes. Some people also have torii, but those are rather unusual; if you put them in the right place, you are either making offerings outside the torii, which seems wrong, or the torii gets in the way, which is annoying. I would, however, recommend keeping things relatively simple to start with: something to hold the ofuda, and something to hold the offerings, with, maybe, sakaki or a substitute if you want.

VENERATING THE KAMIDANA

Venerating a kamidana is very similar to performing yōhai, so there will be a large section in here that is copy and pasted from there, as it is probably more convenient for readers to have everything in one place.

The biggest difference is the offerings. While you do not make offerings when performing yōhai, you do when venerating a kamidana.

The basic offerings are rice, sake, salt, and water. Each offering should be separate, on its own plate or in its own bottle or cup. The rice may be either cooked or uncooked; both forms have a long history, although uncooked rice is more common these days. The sake should be Japanese sake — alcohol derived from rice. The role of rice in the offerings is very important in Shinto. The salt would traditionally be sea salt, but any kind of salt is acceptable. The water should be pure, but it can be from the tap, if your tap water is safe to drink. Normally, you offer a small amount of each; the standard offering plates are small, so there would probably be less than 10 g of rice, and less than a teaspoonful of salt. Omitting the sake is a standard choice, but the other three should all be offered.

You should prepare the offerings immediately before you venerate the kamidana.

If you place the offerings on a traditional sanbō, the staple holding the rim around the tray closed should face away from the kami, which means that the side of the base without a hole should face the kami. Oshiki also have the staple, and it should face away from the kami. If you use another sort of tray, the front should be towards the kami if the tray has an identifiable front.

The offerings have an order of importance: rice, sake, salt, water. They should be offered in a way that respects that order. If you line them up in front of the kami, then this is the same as for ofuda: rice in the middle, sake to the left and right, then salt to your right (the kami’s left), and water to the other side.

If you place them on a sanbō, which is roughly square, there are two standard choices. Jinja Honchō recommends that the rice goes nearest the kami, with the sake behind it and to either side, and the salt and rice behind the sake (and thus nearest to you, with the salt on your right and the water on your left). The other standard option puts the rice in the centre, with the sake on either side towards the kami, and the salt and water away from the kami (again, with salt on your right). These choices are both sufficiently traditional that you can choose whichever you prefer. I follow Jinja Honchō’s recommendations, but then, I work for them.

When you carry the offerings, you should carry them at about eye level, so that you do not breathe on them. Bow slightly before placing them on the kamidana, where they should be directly in front of the central ofuda, and then step backwards, away from the kamidana.

Once you have placed the offerings, purify yourself, as described earlier.

After you have purified yourself, bow very slightly. You start paying reverence to the kami with this slight bow, so from this point, until the reverence finishes, you should pay attention to how you are acting.

Take three steps forward, if the room where your kamidana is placed is large enough to allow this. Try to have at least a symbolic half-step forward; the idea is that you are reverently approaching the kami.

Bow to about 45º.

Stand up straight, and pause for a couple of seconds.

Bow deeply twice.

Stand up straight, and pause for a couple of seconds.

Bow your head, or bow slightly from the waist, and recite the following prayer, with your head still down:

Korë no kamutoko ni masu kakëmakumo kashikoki [insert jinja names] no ōmaë o orogami matsuritë kashikomi kashikomi mōsaku,

Ōkamitachi no hiroki atsuki mimëgumi o katajikënami matsuri

Takaki tōtoki mioshië no manimani naoki tadashiki magokoro mochitë makoto no michi ni tagau koto naku

Oimotsu waza ni hagëmashimë tamai

Iëkado takaku misukoyaka ni

Yo no tamë hito no tamë ni tsukusashimë tamaë to

Kashikomi kashikomi mo mōsu

This means, line by line:

As I venerate the kami of [jinja], whose name it is fearful even to utter, who are seated on this kamidana, I pray that

I may humbly offer up the broad and deep blessings of kami with deep awe,

I may follow the true path without straying in accordance with the high and noble teachings of the kami, bearing an honest, true, and sincere heart

Give me energy for the work I do,

Raise up my household in health,

And enable me to give my all for the world and for other people.

I most humbly and reverently so pray.

Where it says [insert jinja names], you should insert the names of all the jinja, in the order of importance that you have decided to follow for the ofuda. As discussed in the section on yōhai, these should technically be the formal Japanese names, but the name that you know the jinja by should be sufficient.

When you have finished reciting the prayer, stand up straight again, and pay reverence.

First, bow deeply twice.

Stand up straight again.

Put your hands together in front of your chest, at about shoulder height. Slide the right hand down slightly so that the tips of the fingers are around the first joint of the fingers on your left hand. Clap twice, loudly, opening your hands to the width of your chest before clapping them. (They shouldn’t go much out beyond your body, but you do not have to be perfectly precise.) After the second clap, leave your hands together and slide the right hand back up, so that the fingers of both hands align. Then put your arms down by your sides.

Bow deeply once.

Stand up straight, and pause for a few seconds.

Bow once, down to about 45º, and straighten up.

Take three steps backwards. You should actually walk backwards, looking towards the kami.

Bow slightly, once.

That marks the end of the reverence.

Next, step forwards and bow slightly before removing the offerings from the kamidana. Once you have taken them away, take the offerings off the plates. Ideally, you should now eat the offerings, but it is also acceptable to put them aside to be eaten later (particularly if the rice is not cooked). You should avoid throwing them away. (If you do not drink, do not offer sake.) Quickly rinse off the vessels, dry them, and put them back on the sanbō. It is acceptable to store them on the kamidana, but also to have them somewhere else. The vessels should be washed properly fairly frequently, but it is not necessary to do that every time. One beneficial side effect of eating the offerings is that your sense of whether you are happy to eat off the plates will keep the washing frequent enough.

You may make other offerings on the kamidana. Food that you have grown, or that you brought from a distant place, or received as a gift, is all appropriate, no matter what it is. You can also offer other items, particularly things that you have created, such as artworks. As with the standard offerings, they should be taken down immediately after you complete the veneration, and edible things should be eaten. Anything for which you feel grateful is an appropriate offering. For things that will not, physically, go on the kamidana (either because they are too big, or because they are not physical in the first place), writing what it is on a piece of paper and offering that is an appropriate substitute.

IN CONCLUSION

This essay has been a set of instructions, telling you what to do. I would like to finish by reiterating that this is not the only way to practise Shinto outside Japan. Shinto practice is extremely diverse in Japan, and many of those practices could be reproduced in other countries, where they would clearly be Shinto. What this essay provides is a form of practice that clearly is Shinto — and not just some form of neo-Paganism with Japanese trappings —, and that can be practised outside Japan without too much trouble. It is a place to start, and no more, but no less, than that.