Volume 19 Belief System 692 CE–present

Shinto

The machinetransmission by demolition

Attested from: 692 CE
Narrates: 692 CE–present

The argument in one sentence

A practice with no founder, no creed and no scripture in the ordinary sense kept itself transmissible for thirteen documented centuries by carrying skills instead of texts — above all by demolishing and rebuilding its greatest shrine every twenty years, so that the building is disposable and the builder is not — and whether that practice was ever a single self-standing religion is a real and open question, which the modern Japanese state answered twice, in opposite directions, both times as an act of administration and of money rather than of theology.

Ise’s shrine has been demolished and identically rebuilt every twenty years since 692, sixty-two times as of 2013, which makes the carpentry itself the transmission medium. The last rebuild cost about 57 billion yen, privately donated.The commissioning line

What it is

Ise Jingu is demolished and rebuilt on an adjacent plot every twenty years. The empty twin site is always visible. The building is disposable. The carpenter is not.

This is a history of a practice with no founder, no creed and no scripture in the ordinary sense, and of how we know.

From a closed island of offerings and a queen in a Chinese chronicle to a modern state that answered “is this one religion?” twice, in opposite directions, both times as administration and money. A register of thousands of entitled shrines. Hereditary houses that carried the liturgies until a licence replaced a bloodline. Two court chronicles that closed a genealogy, not a faith. A purification still spoken every June and December. An amulet network abolished overnight. A rebuild that costs what a city costs.

Whether the practice was ever a single self-standing religion is a real and open question. This book reports the argument and settles nothing.

Five movements: the world it began in, the machine that carried it, the canon nobody needed, the money, and the split — not a schism, but a state-ordered separation from the Buddhism these shrines had been combined with for a thousand years.

The book never adjudicates. Every translation is named in the text. Every figure carries its source in the same sentence. What stands inside the sanctuary, and what any pilgrim believes, cannot be established, and the book says so.

Belief System, Volume 19.

In full

A practice with no founder, no creed and no scripture in the ordinary sense kept itself transmissible for thirteen documented centuries by carrying skills instead of texts. The greatest shrine is demolished and rebuilt on a twin plot so that the building is disposable and the builder is not. Whether that practice was ever a single self-standing religion is a real and open question. The modern Japanese state answered it twice, in opposite directions, both times as administration and money rather than as theology.

Kuroda Toshio argued in 1981 that kami worship lived inside a combined kami-buddha system for over a thousand years, and that “Shinto” as an independent religion is a medieval construction at the earliest and substantially a Meiji one. His critics answer that shrines, rites and myths form a continuous braid worth the name even without a self-conscious -ism. This book reports the thesis, reports the critics, and settles nothing.

The span line — 692/712 — is where the record starts: a rebuilding conventionally dated at Ise, a chronicle dated by its own preface. The practice on the ground is older. Okinoshima’s open-air deposits run from about the fourth century. A Chinese dynastic history compiled before 297 describes a queen of Wa who occupied herself with spirit-arts. None of that is a birthday.

The Kojiki is quoted in Chamberlain’s 1882 rendering, named every time; the Nihon Shoki in Aston’s 1896. Official English of the Meiji Constitution, the Shinto Directive and the 1947 Constitution is named as official. What stands inside the sanctuaries cannot be established from a public description, because there is no public description.

The volume uses five fixed phrases, and no sixth. It reports no kami as fact and denies none. It never tells you what any pilgrim believes.

Belief System is a history of world religion, one tradition at a time. Thirty-one volumes, ordered by earliest secure attestation.

The geography

Places in Shinto

Explore selected places in this book. Press play for a narrated tour, or choose a marker or a place in the list to read its context.

Listen and explore · 0:45

A three-stop audio guide

AI-generated voice · OpenAI Marin

1. IseCity area
2. NaraCity area
3. TokyoCity area
4. OkinoshimaHistoric site area

Okinoshima begins with offerings on an island. The marker identifies the sacred island in the Munakata group, rather than the similarly named Oki Islands. Archaeological objects provide a kind of evidence distinct from later written accounts.

Read the full transcript

1. Okinoshima

2. Ise

Ise adds a major shrine setting to the map. The book asks how religious practices and institutions were carried across time. The city-area marker does not define every precinct or establish the age of every tradition attached to it.

3. Tokyo

Tokyo appears in the discussion of the families who carried religious authority. The story includes people, offices and institutional arrangements, not only sacred buildings. Select the marker to read the passage and follow its chapter reference.

Ise

City-area locator, not a building or exact event location.

From the manuscript · chapter 1

The span line starts where the record starts. Court chronicles conventionally date a rebuilding at Ise to 690 and 692. The Kojiki's preface dates itself to 712. Those are documents a later reader can open. The island's pits are not. A series that ordered itself by earliest secure attestation put this volume at 692 because a rebuild is a dated administrative act and a deposit is not. The practice is …

Chapter 1: The Island of Offerings

Location: GeoNames · Ise. 34.48°N, 136.70°E.

Nara

Nara, Japan; not Nara in Mali.

From the manuscript · chapter 2

One mound in the Nara basin, Hashihaka, has been drawn into dating arguments that try to match the Wei notice's great tomb to a visible earthwork. The match is contested. So is the dating. Surrounding features and pottery sequences have been used to place the mound in the third century; other readings refuse the identification altogether. The Imperial Household Agency's designation of certain keyhole mounds as imperial mausolea is why …

Chapter 2: The Queen in the Chinese Record

Location: GeoNames · Nara-shi. 34.69°N, 135.80°E.

Tokyo

City-area locator, not a building or exact event location.

From the manuscript · chapter 11

… system. The two universities are the institutions of the newer one. Both are still in the same landscape. Kokugakuin in Tokyo and Kogakkan at Ise are not medieval houses under new names. They are modern universities that issue the licence the 1871 order made necessary. A priest who qualifies through them is an appointee with a curriculum, not a son with a memorial of grievances. The houses did not all …

Chapter 11: The Families Who Carried It

Location: Natural Earth · Tokyo. 35.69°N, 139.75°E.

Okinoshima

Sacred island in the Munakata group; not the similarly named Oki Islands.

From the manuscript · chapter 1

The island is closed. Munakata Taisha's three shrines still operate on the mainland and on Oshima; Okinoshima itself, in the Korea Strait, admits no visitors. That is a present fact, not an excavation season. The UNESCO nomination file for the Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region, inscribed in July 2017, reports roughly 80,000 artefacts deposited at open-air ritual sites from about the fourth century to …

Chapter 1: The Island of Offerings

Location: UNESCO · component 1535-001. 34.24°N, 130.11°E.

Modern coastline: Natural Earth (public domain). Place data: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0), Pleiades contributors (CC BY 3.0), and the sources linked for each place. Gazetteer coordinates have been selected and adapted for these reading maps. Rectangles show approximate location extents, not religious territory or historical borders. This is a selected reading guide, not a complete place-name index.

The contents

26 chapters in five movements. Every volume in the series has the same five, in the same order, and each chapter below is printed with the idea it carries.

Movement OneThe World

Kami veneration as the record actually shows it: local practice around specific places, with no founder, no founding date and no original doctrine — and the framing question the whole volume keeps open, stated early: was this ever one religion at all?

1The Island of OfferingsThe record starts as objects on the ground: on Okinoshima, an uninhabited island in the Korea Strait, roughly 80,000 artefacts — mirrors, gilt-bronze horse trappings, glass from as far west as Persia — were deposited at open-air ritual sites over some five centuries, from about the fourth century to the ninth, with no text anywhere; this is what kami veneration looks like before anyone writes it down, and the volume’s span line is where the record starts, not where the practice does.
2The Queen in the Chinese RecordThe earliest written witness to ritual in the archipelago is foreign: a Chinese dynastic history compiled before 297 CE describes the country of Wa, its unmarried queen Himiko who — in the chronicle’s words — occupied herself with spirit-arts, and her seclusion, attendants and great mounded tomb; what the archipelago’s own soil adds is mute and rich — bronze bells buried in hillsides by the hundred for no recorded reason, Chinese mirrors in tombs, and the giant keyhole mounds — and where Yamatai itself stood is contested, and has been for three hundred years.
3What the Word Kami CoversKami are not gods in the Greek sense and the tradition never wrote a definition for thirteen centuries — the most-quoted one was composed by the philologist Motoori Norinaga in the eighteenth century, and the chapter says so as it uses it — what the early record shows instead is dispersal: a kami of this mountain, this rice field, this clan; worship organised around specific places and calendrical matsuri rather than around belief; and at Omiwa the shrine has no image and no inner sanctuary building at all, because the mountain itself is the object.
4The Buddhas ArriveBuddhism reaches the court — conventionally dated 552, with a rival tradition giving 538 — and the chronicle stages a debate about it as a quarrel between clans over whether the kami of the land would be angered; what actually followed, for over a thousand years, was combination: temples built at shrines, kami recast as protectors of the Buddha’s law and as beings themselves suffering and in need of liberation, and by 749 the kami Hachiman travels in state to Nara to bless the casting of the Great Buddha.
5A Ministry of the GodsThe eighth-century state built a bureaucracy of worship: the ritsuryo codes set a Department of Divinities (jingikan) formally beside the Council of State, with a calendar of rites, offering tables and provincial distribution — which is the strongest evidence that kami ritual was central to the early state, and the weakest evidence for a freestanding religion, because what the department administered was procedure, not doctrine; and its later history is decay: by the medieval centuries the office was a shell and its functions had drifted to hereditary houses.
6Was There a Shinto?The honest framing question, asked where it belongs — early: Kuroda Toshio argued in 1981 that “Shinto” as a self-standing religion distinct from Buddhism is a medieval construction at the earliest and substantially a Meiji one, the word itself in the earliest chronicle possibly reading as a generic continental term — and his critics answer that shrines, rites and myths form a continuous braid worth the name even without a self-conscious -ism; the volume reports the thesis, reports the critics, and settles nothing, but its own structure is built so the reader can see exactly why the question is arguable.

Movement TwoThe Machine

The transmission technology, named as a concrete object or institution — not an abstraction. Here: a shrine that is deliberately impermanent so that the skill has to be permanent, plus the ranked network and the hereditary houses that carried everything else.

7The Twenty-Year ClockIse Jingu is demolished and rebuilt on an adjacent, identical plot every twenty years — the empty twin site always visible beside the standing shrine — a practice conventionally dated to 690 for the Inner Shrine and 692 for the Outer, performed for the sixty-second time in 2013 and next due in 2033; and the arithmetic is itself the history, because sixty-two cycles by 2013 do not fit twenty-year spacing from 690: the record shows lapses of more than a century during the civil wars, and the shrine’s claim of unbroken rhythm is the institution’s own framing, printed here beside the gaps.
8The Carpenter Is the ArchiveWhat the rebuilding transmits is not a text but a set of hands: the twenty-year interval is a human career, short enough that a carpenter who assisted at one rebuild can supervise the next, so the craft — joinery, tools, timber selection, the remaking of every treasure and vestment — passes from body to body on schedule; the artefact is deliberately impermanent so that the skill has to be permanent, and the institution maintains its own construction office and its own forests to guarantee the machine its inputs.
9Three Answers to the Copying ProblemSet the rebuilt shrine beside the two great text machines of earlier volumes and the design choice comes into focus: the Vedic reciters preserved sound by transforming the text into self-checking permutations, the Masoretic scribes preserved spelling by counting letters and logging their own errors in the margin — and Ise preserves neither sound nor spelling but skill, and it is the only one of the three that throws the copy away on purpose; each machine also has a single point of failure, and Ise’s is money, because when the funding stops the clock stops, which hands the Money movement its subject two movements early.
10The Register of 2,861 ShrinesThe network had a protocol: the Engishiki — procedures of the Engi era, compiled 927, in force from 967 — lists the shrines entitled to official offerings, conventionally counted at 2,861 shrines housing 3,132 kami, ranked greater and lesser, with a synchronised calendar so that one court rite fanned out into thousands of local ones; the register outlived its own state — shrines still advertise “listed in the Engishiki” on their signboards today — and the modern state built the same machine twice, creating a national shrine-ranking system in 1871 and abolishing it in 1946.
11The Families Who Carried ItBefore there were seminaries there were houses: the Nakatomi held the court liturgies, the Imbe the abstentions and regalia — and in 807 a passed-over Imbe wrote a formal memorial of grievances, one lineage’s complaint that another had engrossed the rites, which is the clearest surviving document of priesthood as heritable property; the Urabe read turtle shells and their Yoshida descendants would one day claim all Shinto; the Watarai held Ise’s Outer Shrine — until the Meiji state abolished hereditary succession at a stroke in 1871, and the modern machine replaced birth with a licence: priests today qualify through two universities.

Movement ThreeThe Canon

What is in, what is out, who decided, when, and what the decision cost. The real subject is who had the authority to close it — and this is a canon movement about a tradition that never needed one. The movement opens with that argument, never with a text.

12A Canon Nobody NeededEvery canon movement in this series has watched an authority close a text and pay for it — the Islam volume watched a caliph do it inside twenty years — but this tradition has no creed, no equivalent of a sermon, and no scripture in the devotional sense: nothing needed closing because nothing was propositional; what the eighth-century court actually closed, in two state-commissioned books, was a genealogy — the descent of the ruling house from the sun kami — and the nearest things to scripture this tradition possesses are a book of liturgies and a book of procedures, which is exactly what a tradition of practice rather than belief would be expected to canonise.
13An Emperor Orders a PastThe Kojiki of 712 announces its own politics in its preface: Emperor Tenmu — who had just taken the throne in a civil war — is quoted ordering the correction of the “errors” in the clans’ competing records, a reciter named Hieda no Are is set to memorise the true version, and a generation later O no Yasumaro writes it down; the result runs from the world’s beginning to a seventh-century court, spine-first through the genealogy that makes the rulers descendants of Amaterasu — a political document about origins, not scripture in a devotional sense, and for most of the next thousand years almost nobody read it.
14The Chronicle That Footnotes ItselfThe Nihon Shoki of 720 is the official version — court history in classical Chinese, in the continental mode, its completion recorded in the next official chronicle, which is this volume’s cleanest attestation — and its most remarkable feature is editorial honesty about myth: again and again it interrupts its own narrative with variant traditions introduced by the formula “in one writing it is said”, a chronicle footnoting its own gods; its chronology is another matter — the early reigns run impossibly long, and conventionally nothing before the sixth century is accepted as dateable history.
15The Great PurificationThe closest thing to scripture that is actually recited is liturgy: the Engishiki preserves twenty-seven norito, formal addresses spoken to kami — and the greatest of them, the Great Purification, is structured as a list, a catalogue of heavenly and earthly offences to be swept away twice a year; these are words that do things rather than words that teach things — no doctrine is stated anywhere in the corpus — and they are still spoken: the purification is performed at shrines across Japan every June and December.
16The Late CanonsEvery attempt to give Shinto a closed doctrinal canon is datable, late, and attached to an institutional interest: the Outer Shrine’s Watarai priests produced “Five Books” claiming deep antiquity that scholarship conventionally dates to the thirteenth century; Yoshida Kanetomo built a fifteenth-century system claiming his own house held the one-and-only original Shinto, and sold certifications on the strength of it; and the eighteenth-century kokugaku philologists, above all Motoori Norinaga with his forty-four-book Kojiki commentary, made a near-unread chronicle into scripture retroactively — and each of these worked on genuinely ancient material, which is why the Kuroda question stays open instead of closing.

Movement FourThe Money

Who paid, who was paid, and how we know. Numbers get their provenance in the same sentence — and in this volume the machine and the money are the same story, because when the funding stops the twenty-year clock stops.

17The Divine DistrictsThe early funding was state assignment: the court gave Ise whole districts whose taxes fed the shrine, and the Engishiki’s offering tables are fiscal documents — so many lengths of cloth, so many jars of sake, itemised per shrine per rite — which makes them the best evidence in the volume for who paid and what it cost; and when court finance failed in the medieval centuries, Ise did what every institution in this series does when its patron fails: it built a private economy, accumulating estates across the provinces, and the movement’s thesis is set here — each funding regime makes a different Shinto.
18The Amulet NetworkBy the Edo period Ise ran the largest religious distribution network in the country without owning a single doctrine: hereditary agents — the onshi — held parish registers of confraternities across Japan, distributed the shrine’s amulets, collected first-fruits payments, and lodged their parishioners on pilgrimage in agent-towns at the shrine gates; the system produced the okage mairi, spasms of mass pilgrimage in which contemporary counts — transmitted as estimates and printed only as such — put millions of people on the Ise roads within months; and in 1871 the new Meiji state abolished the entire network by decree, overnight.
19The Price of ImpermanenceA shrine that must be rebuilt every twenty years is a shrine that must be paid for every twenty years, and the funding history is the machine’s history: court-funded while the court could pay; stopped for over a century when it could not — and restarted in the sixteenth century substantially by Buddhist nuns whose alms campaigns rescued the rebuilding of Shinto’s central shrine, in the centuries when the two were one system; then warlord patronage, then shogunal obligation, then the modern state budget until 1945; the 1949 rebuild was postponed to 1953 and funded privately for the first time in the modern era, and the 2013 cycle is reported at about ¥57 billion, privately donated — the headline figure verified, the internal split not.
20The Rite EconomyThe modern shrine has no tithe, no dues and no weekly collection; it sells moments and objects — amulets and talismans that are formally offerings, the New Year hatsumode visit, the shrine wedding (a format conventionally dated to imitation of the 1900 crown-prince rite), the purification of new cars, new buildings and new companies — and the state’s own supreme court has had to rule on whether one of these rites is religion at all: in 1977 it held, over dissent, that a city’s payment for a Shinto groundbreaking ceremony was constitutional secular custom, a judgment that hands the volume’s final chapter its question.
21The State as Paymaster, TwiceIn 1871 the new state seized shrine lands, abolished hereditary priesthoods, ranked every shrine in the country and put the top ranks on public offering budgets — the doctrine that “shrine Shinto is not a religion” was, among other things, a fiscal formula, because a non-religion could lawfully be paid from taxes — while underfunded ordinary shrines were pushed into the rite economy; in December 1945 a single occupation directive cut every yen of public support at a stroke; and the line drawn then is still live, because the 2019 accession rite was paid for from public funds over a recorded objection from inside the imperial family itself, and the lawsuits followed.

Movement FiveThe Split

What divided it, what it became, what it handed on. The split here is the strangest in the series: not a schism inside the tradition but a state-ordered separation from the religion it had been combined with for a thousand years — followed by an invented orthodoxy, its dismantling, and a country where the two largest majorities contradict each other. Names the next volume by NAME, never by number.

22Separating the GodsIn the spring of 1868 the new government issued a run of administrative orders separating kami from buddhas: Buddhist clergy serving at shrines were ordered to laicise or leave, kami stripped of their Buddhist titles, Buddhist images and apparatus removed from shrine precincts — an administrative order, not a doctrine — and what followed in some domains went far beyond the order’s text: the wave of destruction remembered as haibutsu kishaku closed every temple in Satsuma and levelled thousands elsewhere, while the government issued follow-up proclamations disclaiming any intent to destroy; the volume reports documented policy and documented consequence, and prosecutes nobody.
23The Religion That Officially Was Not OneOver the next four decades the state assembled what was later named State Shinto: priests of the ranked shrines barred in 1882 from doctrinal teaching and funerals — the administrative sentence that made shrines officially not a religion — while thirteen “Sect Shinto” bodies were licensed as religions to quarantine the believing kind; the constitution of 1889 granted religious freedom “within limits not prejudicial to peace and order and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects”; the 1890 Rescript on Education became a school liturgy; from 1906 the state consolidated roughly a third of the country’s shrines out of existence; and shrine reverence was exported and enforced in the colonies — documented policy, documented consequence, adjudicated nowhere in this book.
24Two Documents End ItOn 15 December 1945 the occupation issued the Shinto Directive — a document that had to define State Shinto in order to abolish it, severing all public funding, removing Shinto from schools, and dissolving the ranks; on 1 January 1946 the emperor issued a rescript rejecting the conception of himself as a manifest deity; and the shrines, cut loose, reorganised within weeks as a voluntary private federation — the Association of Shinto Shrines, which most of the country’s shrines joined — so that the tradition entered the postwar era in the same legal clothing as any church, sect or new religion: a religious corporation, which is precisely the category the previous eighty years had been built to deny.
25YasukuniOne shrine keeps the settlement’s unfinished business in the news: founded in 1869 for the war dead and holding, by its own count, some 2.5 million enshrined spirits, Yasukuni secretly enshrined fourteen convicted Class-A war criminals in 1978 — public knowledge the following spring — after which the Showa emperor, who had visited eight times, never visited again; a memorandum reported in 2006 records a courtier’s account of his displeasure, and its reading is itself contested; prime-ministerial visits have drawn documented protests from China and Korea and a string of lawsuits, and in 1997 the supreme court held a prefecture’s public offerings to the shrine unconstitutional — the volume reports the dispute’s structure, each party’s stated position, and the proposed alternatives, and takes no position on any of it, including the visits.
26The Two MajoritiesThe volume ends on the series’ strangest pair of numbers: the state’s Religious Yearbook counts roughly seven in ten Japanese as Shinto adherents — because shrines report their parish households — while national surveys find roughly seven in ten professing no personal religious faith; both numbers are printed with their sources and their question wordings, because the discrepancy is not about behaviour but about the word “religion”, a Meiji-era coinage fitted onto this tradition twice — once in 1882 so the state could fund it, once in 1945 so the state could stop — and a tradition with no founder, no creed, no canon and a shrine that is rebuilt rather than preserved is exactly the case the category was never built to hold; the reader who has followed the whole volume already knows why, which is the volume’s answer to the question its first movement refused to settle.

What this volume cannot establish

Printed in the book before the argument is, and printed here for the same reason. A history of a tradition that will not say where its evidence runs out is not a history.

Anything before the eighth century except through objects and foreign chronicles. The span line on this volume’s own cover — 692/712 onward — is an attestation date, not a founding date: the practice is plainly older than the record, but its content before the chronicles is archaeology plus inference, and the volume says so every time. What was said or believed at any rite before 712 cannot be established. (The front matter prints the attestation-versus-tradition distinction, per the series chronology’s standing flag on this volume.)
Whether “Shinto” existed as a self-standing religion before the medieval period at the earliest. The Kuroda thesis holds that it did not — that kami worship lived inside a combined kami-buddha system for over a thousand years and that “Shinto” as an independent religion is a medieval construction at the earliest and substantially a Meiji one. The thesis is reported, its critics are reported by name, and the volume settles nothing; it is structured so the reader can watch the evidence assemble on both sides. (Stated inside Movement One, not saved for a coda.)
When the rebuilding began. The twenty-year cycle at Ise is conventionally dated to 690 for the Inner Shrine and 692 for the Outer, on the strength of court-chronicle entries; continuous contemporaneous documentation of the cycles is later, the count of sixty-two by 2013 includes recorded interruptions of more than a century, and “every twenty years since 690” is the institution’s own framing. The record shows the gaps, and the volume prints them.
What stands inside the sanctuaries. The mirror is never displayed, the heart pillar never shown; every description is report. The volume states the institution’s own account of its secret and does not speculate — an explained absence, per the series’ own rule.
What any pilgrim, ancient or modern, believes. Surveys measure answers to particular question wordings; participation is countable, interiority is not. No interior states, for anybody.
Most numbers before the modern era. Pilgrim counts for the great okage mairi waves are contemporary estimates transmitted through scholarship; onshi household counts and shrine-merger totals differ by source. Every number prints its provenance in the same sentence, and the funding split of the 2013 rebuild beyond its headline figure is UNVERIFIED until a verification pass says otherwise.
Where Yamatai was, or what Himiko practised. The earliest written witness to ritual in the archipelago is Chinese, external, and attached to a location dispute that has run for three centuries.

Sources

49 works, dated, and specific enough that a reader can go and look at the thing. Nothing is on this list that the desk did not consult.

The bibliography, as the volume prints it
#	Document or work	Date	Evidence for
1	UNESCO nomination file, Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region	inscribed July 2017	roughly 80,000 open-air deposits, fourth–ninth centuries — the nomination’s figures
2	Wei zhi account of Wa	compiled before 297	Himiko and guidao, in this book’s Chinese; Tsunoda–Goodrich not used
3	Motoori Norinaga, Kojiki-den	completed 1798	the late definition of kami; the unread chronicle made into scripture
4	Ernest Satow, “The Revival of Pure Shinto,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan	1875	Norinaga’s usage in English
5	Man’yoshu	eighth century	the word used and not explained
6	Nihon Shoki, W. G. Aston, Nihongi	720; trans. 1896	the arrival debate; the Yomei pairing; “in one writing it is said”
7	Tado vow, dated by its temple inventory	780s	a kami written into a Buddhist career
8	Shoku Nihongi	eighth century	Hachiman’s progress to Nara, 749; the 720 presentation notice
9	Taiho code, surviving through the Yoro code and commentaries	701; later texts	the jingikan as recovered procedure, not doctrine
10	Engishiki	compiled 927; in force 967	rite calendar; shrine register; twenty-seven norito; offering tables
11	Helen Hardacre, Shinto: A History	2017	medieval hollowing of the Department of Divinities
12	John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto	2010	the continuity case; the houses; late canons
13	Kuroda Toshio, “Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion,” James Dobbins and Suzanne Gay, Journal of Japanese Studies	1981	the framing thesis: a medieval construction, substantially Meiji
14	Mark Teeuwen, “From Jindo to Shinto: A Concept Takes Shape,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies	2002	the word’s career
15	Mark Teeuwen and Bernhard Scheid (eds.), JJRS special issue	2002	the responses collected in one journal
16	John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, A Social History of the Ise Shrines	2017	the twenty-year clock; mikuriya estates; the onshi; the Keikoin nuns
17	Ise Jingu published sengu inventory	2013 cycle	sixty-five buildings, treasures and apparel remade — the shrine’s own figures
18	Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1988	1989	1871 ranking and land seizure; 1871 abolition of houses and onshi; the 1882 bar
19	Kogo Shui, Imbe no Hironari	807	one house’s memorial that another had stolen the rites
20	Kojiki, Basil Hall Chamberlain, Ko-ji-ki: Records of Ancient Matters, TASJ	712; trans. 1882	Tenmu’s commission, the reciter, and the writing-down, in the book’s own words
21	Shinpukuji Kojiki manuscript	conventionally 1371–72	the gap between composition and the oldest surviving copy
22	Karl Florenz, “Ancient Japanese Rituals,” Part IV, TASJ	1899	the Great Purification — the series’ second hand
23	Ernest Satow, “Ancient Japanese Rituals,” TASJ	1879–81	harvest norito and the offering-type English; never Bock
24	Shinto Gobusho	conventionally thirteenth century	Watarai Five Books claiming a deeper antiquity
25	Yoshida Kanetomo, Yuiitsu system	fifteenth century	canon-closing as a franchise
26	Ian Reader and George Tanabe, Practically Religious	1998	the economy of worldly benefits
27	Tsu City jichinsai case, Supreme Court Grand Bench	13 July 1977	a city’s groundbreaking held constitutional secular custom
28	Shinto Directive, SCAPIN-448	15 December 1945	the cut; State Shinto defined in order to be abolished
29	Constitution of Japan, Articles 20 and 89, official English	1947	the cut made permanent
30	2019 Daijosai public-funding file	2019	about ¥2.4bn reported; Prince Akishino’s recorded objection; suits dismissed
31	1868 separation orders	spring 1868	staff, titles and images reassigned — an administrative cut
32	Allan Grapard, “Japan’s Ignored Cultural Revolution,” History of Religions	1984	haibutsu kishaku as documented consequence
33	James Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan	1990	domain-level tolls, Satsuma among them
34	Meiji Constitution, Article 28, Ito Miyoji’s official translation	1889	freedom of belief with two locks
35	Imperial Rescript on Education, official translation	30 October 1890	the school liturgy
36	Wilbur Fridell, Japanese Shrine Mergers 1906–12	1973	roughly 190,000 shrines reduced toward 110,000 — totals differ by source
37	D. C. Holtom, The National Faith of Japan; Modern Japan and Shinto Nationalism	1938 and 1943	contemporary witness to coerced shrine visits
38	William Woodard, The Allied Occupation of Japan 1945–1952 and Japanese Religions	1972	Bunce and SCAP’s Religions Division
39	Imperial rescript of 1 January 1946, official English release	1 January 1946	the akitsumikami conception rejected
40	Religious Corporations Law	1951	shrines as religious corporations — the category the previous eighty years denied
41	Jinja Honcho (Association of Shinto Shrines)	founded February 1946	a voluntary federation; about 80,000 member shrines, the association’s figure
42	Yasukuni Jinja’s own enshrinement register	shrine’s published count	some 2.5 million spirits; the 1978 Class-A enshrinement disclosed in 1979
43	Tomita memorandum as reported by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun	July 2006	a reported document, not a window into a mind
44	Ehime Tamagushi case, Supreme Court Grand Bench	2 April 1997	a prefecture’s public offerings to Yasukuni held unconstitutional
45	John Breen (ed.), Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past	2008	the dispute’s structure; Chidorigafuchi as a proposed alternative
46	Agency for Cultural Affairs, Shukyo Nenkan	2015 statistical research on religion	89.5 million / 70.4 per cent by shrine household returns
47	Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japanese National Character Survey	2013	“Do you have any personal religious faith?” — 72 per cent No
48	Japanese General Social Survey	2015	68.6 per cent who do not follow any religion
49	Jason Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan	2012	the Meiji coinage of shukyo

Common questions

When is Shinto first securely attested?

692 CE. That is the earliest date the surviving evidence supports, and it is the key this volume is filed under. It is not the same claim as when the tradition began: the tradition’s own account of its beginning is printed beside it in the book’s front matter, never instead of it.

What period does the book cover?

692 CE–present. The coverage span and the attestation date are two different facts, and the gap between them is often the most interesting thing about a volume.

What carried Shinto?

Transmission by demolition. Movement Two of every volume is about the transmission technology — the concrete object or institution that made copying possible, and would not have existed a century earlier.

How long is it?

About 29,500 words, roughly 125 minutes’ reading. The audiobook runs 2h 59m, measured from the existing audio files.

What does this volume not claim to establish?

Anything before the eighth century except through objects and foreign chronicles. The span line on this volume’s own cover — 692/712 onward — is an attestation date, not a founding date: the practice is plainly older than the record, but its content before the chronicles is archaeology plus inference, and the volume says so every time. What was said or believed at any rite before 712 cannot be established. (The front matter prints the attestation-versus-tradition distinction, per the series chronology’s standing flag on this volume.) Every volume prints its own limits before it prints its argument; there are 7 on this one’s list.

Does the book say which tradition is true?

No. Belief System does not adjudicate. Where the tradition’s account and the earliest evidence disagree, both are given, in their own vocabulary, attributed, and neither is given the last word. No miracle is reported as fact and none is denied.

Can I buy Shinto in print?

Ordering is currently closed. Explore the chapter outlines, sources and historical questions here while book purchasing is unavailable.

The edition

Editions and ISBNs
Edition	Extent	ISBN
Ebook	EPUB	979-8-90623-849-8
Audiobook	2h 59m	979-8-90623-850-4

Filed under
BISAC 1	`REL017000` RELIGION / Comparative Religion
BISAC 2	`REL060000` RELIGION / Shintoism
BISAC 3	`REL033000` RELIGION / History

Shinto
Ise Jingu
Kojiki
kami
Meiji
Shinto Directive
shrine
history of religion
Nihon Shoki
comparative religion