Before There Were Shrines, There Was Just the Mountain
Ancient animism didn’t disappear from Japan. It just changed its clothes.
There is a practice in Japan called goraikō — watching the sunrise from a mountain summit. I’ve done this a few times in my life. You start climbing before midnight, in the dark, your flashlight throwing a small circle of yellow on the path ahead. The mountain is cold and quiet in a way that nothing in a city ever is. You reach the summit and you wait.
When the first sliver of light appears above the horizon, something happens that I’ve never been able to describe adequately. Not peace, exactly. More like recognition — as if the part of you that runs deepest suddenly realizes it is being spoken to.
I’m not a particularly religious person in the organized sense. I don’t follow prescribed rituals with perfect consistency, and I hold my beliefs loosely. But I believe in yaoyorozu no kami — the eight million gods — not as theology but as something closer to what I’d call a felt reality. Mountains hold something. Rivers hold something. Certain old trees and certain large, unusually shaped rocks hold something. Whether that’s “spiritual energy” or simply the accumulated weight of human attention concentrated in one place over thousands of years, I honestly cannot say with certainty.
What I know is that when I stood on a summit and watched the sun emerge, the question felt less important than usual.
If you walk through older parts of a Japanese city, or through the countryside, you’ll occasionally come across something that stops you. A boulder by the road. An enormous old camphor tree in someone’s garden. A gnarled pine at the edge of a park. And wrapped around it, a thick rope made of twisted straw.
That rope is called shimenawa. Most foreign visitors encounter it at shrines and assume it marks a sacred boundary — which it does. But the ropes you find on roadside rocks and old trees that have nothing to do with any official shrine are telling a different, older story.
They say: something lives here.
Not metaphorically. The people who first wrapped those ropes believed, in the most literal sense available to them, that a kami — a presence, a spirit, a concentrated form of life — had taken up residence in that particular stone or tree. The rope was not decoration. It was a marker, a kind of fence between the ordinary world and something that required a different quality of attention.
What strikes me is that nobody removes those ropes. Nobody questions them. Neighbors — often without knowing the theological explanation, often without thinking of themselves as religious at all — maintain them quietly, sometimes for generations. The rock stays marked. The tree stays bound.
This, I think, is what I mean when I say that animism in Japan never really ended. It didn’t evolve into something new. It just kept going, beneath everything built on top of it.
The Shrine Is the Latecomer
The research I’ve been doing recently made something clear that I think most modern Japanese people — including me — tend to forget: the shrine buildings came late.
For most of what archaeologists call the Jōmon period — roughly ten thousand years of continuous human habitation on these islands — there were no shrine structures. No priests in white robes, no formal ritual codified in written texts, no institutional religion in any recognizable sense.
There was the mountain. The river. The rock that was shaped differently from all the others. The tree that had outlived every human who’d ever passed beneath it.
The people who lived here simply noticed. They paid attention to places where something felt more concentrated than elsewhere — where the quality of the air, or the sound, or the weight of light seemed different. They marked those places. They came back to them. Over thousands of years, some of those places accumulated enough layers of human attention that they became formalized. The rope became a torii gate. The improvised offering became an established ritual. The rock that someone’s great-grandmother had set flowers in front of became an altar, and eventually a shrine.
But the rock was always there first.
Archaeological evidence confirms this in ways that continue to surprise me. The grounds of Kashima Jingū in Ibaraki, one of the oldest shrines in the Kantō region, overlap with Jōmon-period shell mounds and sites. The area around Katori Jingū has yielded pottery, clay figurines, and stone tools from the middle and late Jōmon periods. These aren’t coincidences. The places that became shrines were, in many cases, already considered significant before anyone could write down why.
Eight Million Gods — What That Actually Means
The phrase yaoyorozu no kami tends to trip up Western visitors. Are these gods like the gods of Greece — figures with names, personalities, stories? Do Japanese people literally believe a spirit lives inside a rock?
The honest answer is: mostly, not literally. Not in that way.
What the eight million gods describe is better understood as a sensibility — a way of moving through the world in which the boundary between “alive” and “not alive” is much less firm than it is in most Western thinking. A mountain isn’t alive in the way an animal is. But it isn’t entirely not alive either. It changes with the seasons. It catches water and releases it. Things are born from it and die on it. It was here before any human who has ever looked at it, and it will be here after the last one.
If that’s not a form of life, what word do we use for it?
The Jōmon people didn’t have a word for animism. They didn’t need one. They just noticed that the world was full of presences, and they acted accordingly — with attention, with care, with offerings. Modern Japanese people mostly don’t think about this consciously. But when they pause in front of an unusually large old tree, or climb a mountain before dawn to watch the sun come up, or drive past a rope-wrapped boulder and feel — something — they are doing a version of what their ancestors did.
The language has changed. The feeling hasn’t.
Why the Rope Gets Replaced
I want to stay with the shimenawa for a moment, because I think it reveals something that abstract discussions of Shinto often miss.
There is a large, oddly shaped rock near where I grew up. It’s nothing dramatic — not the size of a house, not particularly beautiful. It sits at the edge of a narrow street, and it has had a rope around it for as long as I can remember. Longer than that, according to the older people in the neighborhood.
I’ve asked a few of them who replaces the rope when it wears out.
Nobody could quite say. Someone does it. It gets done.
That, to me, is the most honest description of how animism persists in contemporary Japan. Not through formal belief, not through religious commitment, not through anyone deciding to maintain a tradition consciously. But through a shared intuition — still present, still operating — that certain things warrant attention, that the relationship between people and a particular place needs to be maintained, even when nobody can fully articulate why.
The rope keeps getting replaced because, at some level beneath conscious thought, something in the community still knows the rock is there.
A Note on Goraikō
I want to return to goraikō, because I think it gets to the heart of what I’m trying to say.
Watching the sunrise from a mountain is not uniquely Japanese. People all over the world do it, and many find it moving. The experience of witnessing the return of light from a high place is one of the most ancient and universal human experiences there is.
But in Japan, there is a specific practice of doing this deliberately, as a form of greeting — not recreation. You are not going to watch a pretty sunrise. You are going to receive the sun. To be present when it arrives. The Japanese New Year tradition of hatsu hinode — viewing the first sunrise of the year — is the most formalized version of this, but the sensibility behind it runs through goraikō more broadly.
I think what I feel on a mountain at dawn, when the light breaks, is something very close to what the people who first wrapped ropes around rocks were feeling when they did it. A recognition that we are very small, and the world is very old, and that some things — light returning, water moving, a tree that has been growing for eight hundred years — deserve to be met with full attention rather than casual glance.
Whether that’s religion, I don’t know. Whether it’s Shinto, I’m not sure the label captures it.
It feels, to me, more like a very old form of paying attention. One that happened to survive in Japan in a particularly visible form.
What This Means to Me
I’m aware that writing like this risks sounding as if I’m claiming Japanese people have access to something other cultures have lost. That is not what I believe, and it’s not what I’m trying to say.
What I am saying is narrower: that there are ways of perceiving the natural world — an alertness to its presence, an intuition that certain places and things warrant particular attention — that Japan has kept more visible than many other modern societies. The containers for those perceptions — the ropes, the torii gates, the practices of goraikō — were never fully dismantled. The old forms kept the old feelings alive, even when the theological explanation around them grew thin.
Japan is full of people who walk past rope-wrapped rocks without feeling anything at all. The animistic inheritance that quietly shapes one person’s relationship with the natural world sits completely dormant in another’s. I’m not claiming uniformity.
But the last time I climbed a mountain and stood at the summit before sunrise, waiting for the light, the part of me that went quiet felt genuinely ancient. Not in a grandiose sense. More like recognizing a frequency that had always been there, underneath everything else.
And when I came back down and drove past the rock in my old neighborhood, I noticed the rope had been recently replaced. The straw was still pale, not yet darkened by rain.
Someone had been there.
They always are.
This essay is part of the SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT. A companion dialogue — in which Nicholas and Catherine push back on some of what’s written here, and end up somewhere I didn’t expect — is available here
If you found this useful or thought-provoking, consider following SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT for more writing at the intersection of Japanese philosophy and contemporary life.