Shinto Without Belief: Why the Japanese Still Bow at Shrines

Shinto Without Belief: Why the Japanese Still Bow at Shrines

I have prayed at shrines all my life and believe almost none of it

I have visited Shinto shrines since before I can remember. The shrine of my childhood, in Nishinomiya, is called Koshikiiwa. Its object of worship is not a statue or a scripture but an enormous rock, and around it, scattered through the grounds, stand smaller sacred stones, each honored in turn. I bow at the main hall first, then walk to the great rock, then to the others, one by one. I have done this for decades.

If I am honest, I feel almost nothing.

I say this plainly, because the truth here is more interesting than the reverence a Western reader might expect. The bowing is habit. The order of the stones is form. I am not visited by the sacred. I am simply doing what I have always done, as automatically as I brush my teeth.

And yet there is one thing I do feel, and it took me most of my life to notice it. At my childhood shrine, I feel at home. When I travel and stop at a shrine in some distant province, I feel like an uninvited guest, as if the place were saying, I didn’t call for you, or I don’t know who you are. A few shrines have unsettled me outright. Heitate Jingū in Kyushu, Ōmiwa in Nara, Hokura here near Kobe. At each of these I felt something close to fear.

So the feeling is real. It is simply not the feeling the word “religious” prepares you for; it is closer to the difference between your own house and a stranger’s. Shinto has never asked me what I believe. It asks how I behave in a particular place, and that turns out to be a very different question.

A religion you do, not a religion you believe

Western observers have long been puzzled by a particular Japanese habit: we will say, flatly, “I have no religion,” and then go to a shrine at New Year, buy a protective charm, and bring our children for the shichi-go-san blessing. To an outsider this looks like hypocrisy, or confusion.

Scholars of religion draw a useful line here. Some faiths are built on orthodoxy: right belief, the correct creed held in the mind. Others are built on orthopraxy: right practice, the correct action performed with care. Shinto sits firmly on the side of practice. What matters is less what you privately believe than what you do with your body: you bow at the gate, you rinse your hands, you observe the courtesy of the place.

Let me describe how it actually feels to me. When I visit a shrine in a town I do not know, it is like arriving at a company for a meeting. Even if I could walk straight to the right department, I stop at the front desk, I say where I have come from, I write my name in the book. Reading the shrine’s founding history at the entrance (ah, so that is how this place came to be) is like greeting the head of the neighborhood association before holding a small event on their turf. It is not a confession of faith. It is manners.

Or consider something even more ordinary. Most Japanese bathe every day. I do too, before dinner or before bed, so that I do not carry the day’s dust into my sheets. Is that a rite of purification (Shinto has always disliked kegare, defilement), or just hygiene? It is both, and the honest answer is that the question “which is it, really?” is the wrong question. My visits to unfamiliar shrines are exactly that ambiguous.

I will confess something that makes the point sharper. When my mother died, the priest asked whether we wanted a posthumous Buddhist name for her. I said we did not need one. I do not believe, not by a millimeter, that chanting the right formula opens the gate to paradise. And yet, though our family’s ancestral graves lie in Yokkaichi, I placed my mother’s remains at Konkai-Kōmyōji, a temple a short walk from the center of Kyoto. I chose it, frankly, for its convenience: so that when work brings me to the city, I can slip away by taxi, stop in for a few minutes, and tell her how things are going. I believe none of the doctrine. I keep every one of the practices.

The contradiction that isn’t one

Here is the puzzle that makes people call Shinto illogical. It honors a rock and a dead statesman in the same breath: a mountain and the scholar Sugawara no Michizane, a waterfall and a fox. Nature worshipped as sacred, standing beside human beings who once actually lived and were later made into gods. To a mind trained to sort the world into clean categories, this is not a religion. It is a filing error.

I felt that objection myself, once. Japanese companies often keep a small household shrine, a kamidana, in the office. As a child I thought nothing of it. As I grew up I began to wonder what it was for (a shrine is a sacred place; what is the point of a shelf in an accounting office?), and I noticed people fussing over which way it faced, careful not to point it north, which is really the territory of a quite different tradition. It struck me as incoherent.

What changed my mind was standing in the grounds of Hokura Shrine, above Kobe. The shrine enshrines Susanoo and Ōkuninushi, deities of myth. But its grounds also hold ancient stone arrangements used in worship long before those myths were written down, and pottery has been dug from the same earth dating to centuries before Christ. Standing between the two, I came to think (and I offer this as my own reading, not as scholarship) that the ancient people did not draw the line we draw. Between what feeds you, what frightens you, and what you wish to become, they built no fence. Whether a thing was a mountain or a man who once lived did not decide which side of a boundary it fell on, because there was no boundary to fall on.

The moment that felt like understanding was not when I finally saw the contradiction. It was when I began to suspect that the one pointing at it might be the one who is mistaken.

Japanese philosophers, like Kitarō Nishida, spent their lives trying to render this refusal to choose into rigorous language, affirming reality with all its contradictions. I am not one of those philosophers. I only know it from the inside, as you know your own house in the dark.

Merciless nature, and why people made offerings

On New Year’s Day in 1995, I made my first visit of the year to Heitate Jingū in Kyushu, the very shrine that had once frightened me. Sixteen days later, the Great Hanshin Earthquake destroyed my house. Not one of my relatives was hurt.

I still believe it was because of that visit. I also know, perfectly well, that the survivors were not all devout and the dead were not all faithless. Both of these things are true for me at the same time, and long ago I stopped trying to reconcile them.

What the earthquake gave me was not a doctrine but a posture. Disaster is not an accident waiting for an explanation; it is a certainty to be lived beside. And nature, I learned in my own body, is not cruel. It is indifferent, which is somehow harder to bear.

Consider what New Year’s Day means to a Japanese family. It is the most important day of our year. On the last night of the old year we gather and eat toshikoshi soba, the long buckwheat noodles, quietly grateful to have come through another year unharmed. When the sun rises we eat osechi from its lacquered boxes; even the children take a sip of otoso, the spiced sake, to mark the new year’s arrival. It is a day of homecoming, of relief, of blessing.

On New Year’s Day in 2024, moments after families across the Noto Peninsula had performed exactly these rites, the ground convulsed and took their houses and hundreds of their lives. To the earth beneath them, it was not New Year’s Day. It was not any day. The date that means everything to us meant nothing whatsoever to the force that killed them. That is the indifference I mean. Nature does not hate us; it simply does not notice that we are here.

And it does not end. In the summer of 2026 the ground tore open again in Kumamoto, on Kyushu, and again it killed. Prepare as we might, stay as watchful as we can, the earth still takes someone each time it moves. Suffer that loss over enough centuries and something settles into a people. Not faith, I would hesitate to call it faith, but a slow turning toward the ground itself, an impulse to enshrine the very earth as a kami and to keep, as best we can, the peace with it.

Once you have felt that indifference from the inside, the old rites stop looking primitive. People offered the first rice of the harvest to the sun and the soil. They were not naive. Having no power at all over the ground beneath them, they chose relationship over helplessness. The harvest festival that had always puzzled me suddenly had a reason to exist, and the word animism, which until then I had only known, I now understood.

Why do people do this?

That question (why do people do this?) is what quietly replaced belief for me.

My grandmother was devout. Every day she lit incense at the family altar and recited the sutras from memory. My mother, whom I never once thought of as religious, began murmuring the nenbutsu only after my grandmother was gone. I do little more than change the water on the altar. But when my mother died, I understood, at last, why the two of them had done what they did.

As a boy at the family grave, I pressed my palms together and thought nothing at all. After my grandparents were laid there, I began cleaning the stone carefully each time I came, without ever deciding to.

I did not reach any of this by believing. I reached it by doing, and by feeling, always too late, why others had done the same before me. Belief was the shallow question. This was the one that went all the way down.

The margin in the heart

I have contradicted myself throughout this essay, and I know it. A philosopher might reasonably ask me to point to exactly where the contradiction lies. I do not mind the question. Human beings live holding contradictions; the Zen koan is built out of them on purpose.

To accept a contradiction is almost to say “either is fine.” But to leave a contradiction unresolved on purpose, you need somewhere to stand that leans toward neither side. I have come to think of it as a margin in the heart. Kokoro no yohaku: the blank space left intentionally on the page. It is not the shrug of “whichever, I don’t care.” It is room to breathe, room a settled mind no longer leaves itself.

I promise you nothing. I cannot tell you what will change if you keep such a margin, or that anything will change at all. But I do not believe it changes nothing. Laozi wrote that through non-doing, nothing is left undone. Perhaps refusing to force a contradiction closed is not resignation but space, space to notice what a mind in a hurry to be right walks straight past.

I still feel almost nothing when I stand before the great rock of my childhood. I still go. Not to be answered. Only to keep showing up. And, maybe, to live a little more like a human being.

Takeshi Kitagawa heads the SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT, which aims to introduce Japanese culture. Rooted in his years of Kendo, Zen, and Shinto practice, the project explores whether these traditions have anything real to offer modern life―without pretending they have all the answers.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.