Daily
Temizu — the basin at the gate.
Right hand takes the ladle, rinse the left; swap, rinse the right; pour into the left palm and rinse the mouth without touching the ladle to the lips; tip the ladle up so the water runs down the handle and cleans it for the next person. Then walk the side of the path, because the middle belongs to the kami.
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The kamidana.
A miniature shrine on a high shelf holding the Ise talisman and the local shrine's, with rice, salt, water and sake set out each morning and the same two bows, two claps, one bow. The talismans are exchanged for new ones every New Year and the old ones burned. Fewer than half of households still keep one.
held by most
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Monthly
Hatsumiyamairi — presenting the baby.
About a month after birth the infant is carried to the shrine of the district and formally presented to its kami, with the priest reading the child's name aloud. It is the beginning of the parish relationship, and the relationship is geographic — you belong to the kami of where you live.
held by most
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Misogi — standing under the water.
Cold water directly on the body, in a river or under a waterfall, often in midwinter, with breathing exercises first and someone experienced watching. It follows Izanagi, who washed after the underworld; the account has Amaterasu born from his left eye, Tsukuyomi from his right, and Susanoo from his nose.
⚖ contested within
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Yearly
Shrine visit (sanpai).
Bow at the torii, wash hands and mouth, ring, bow twice, clap twice, bow once. The body knows the liturgy.
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Hatsumōde.
The first shrine visit of the year, made by roughly three-quarters of the country in the first three days of January. Meiji Jingū alone handles around three million people. Most of them will tell a survey they have no religion, and they will queue in the cold for an hour anyway.
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Matsuri — the festival.
The kami is carried through the streets in a portable shrine; sweat, sake, and drums are the offering.
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Omikuji, ema, omamori.
Draw a fortune; if it is bad, tie it to the rack and leave it at the shrine rather than carry it home. Write a wish on a wooden plaque and hang it where the kami will read it. Buy a charm for traffic safety or childbirth or exams, and bring it back in a year to be burned.
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Yakubarai — the unlucky years.
Forty-two for men and thirty-three for women are the bad ones, read as puns on to die and on steep misfortune, and people go to the shrine at the start of the year to have the misfortune waved off. The ages happen to sit where health, career and family pressure actually turn, which the tradition does not claim as a coincidence.
held by most
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The Shinto funeral.
It exists, it is rare, and it is instructive: the spirit is called into a wooden tablet, the corpse is handled as pollution, mourners throw salt over themselves afterwards, and the memorials run to the fiftieth year, at which point the dead becomes an ancestral kami. Only a few percent of funerals are done this way — death was ceded to Buddhism a thousand years ago.
⚖ contested within
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Ōharae — the great purification.
Twice a year, at the end of June and the end of December, you walk a figure of eight through a ring of woven reed at the shrine gate and transfer the year's accumulated pollution onto a paper figure cut in your shape, which is then floated away or burned. Nobody has to say what they did.
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Setsubun.
On 3 February you throw roasted soybeans out of the door shouting demons out, fortune in, and then eat one bean for each year you have lived plus one for the year coming. Somebody has to wear the ogre mask, and it is almost always the father.
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The mikoshi.
The kami is moved into a portable shrine and carried through the parish on the shoulders of sixty people who deliberately jolt and shake it, shouting, along a route that traces the district boundary. A smoothly carried mikoshi is doing it wrong: the shaking is said to please the kami.
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Ise, rebuilt every twenty years.
The shrines are taken down and built again from new cypress on the adjacent plot, with every sacred treasure and textile remade to specification, and the kami moved across at night by torchlight. It has run since the seventh century. The building is never old, and the carpentry survives because it is performed rather than preserved.
held by most
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Once in a life
Shichi-go-san.
Girls at three and seven and boys at three and five, dressed up on 15 November and taken to the shrine, then given chitose-ame — thousand-year candy, in a long bag printed with cranes and turtles. The ages are odd because odd numbers are auspicious, and the candy is long because the wish is for a long life.
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The shrine wedding.
Three sips from each of three stacked cups — san-san-kudo — a pledge read aloud, a branch offered, and about twenty people watching. The form feels ancient and dates from the 1900 wedding of the Taisho emperor; before that most Japanese weddings happened in the house.
held by most
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Jichinsai — asking the ground.
Four bamboo poles, a rope between them, a mound of sand, offerings of rice, salt, water, sake, fish and vegetables, and the landowner cutting the sand three times with a wooden sickle. It is performed before houses, office towers, motorways and power stations, by construction firms whose staff would call themselves entirely secular.
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Ongoing
Kagura.
Dance performed for the kami rather than for the audience — facing the sanctuary, to flute, drum and bells. The village forms in Takachiho and Iwami run all night, thirty-odd numbered pieces, with the audience drinking and dozing through the slow ones and waking for the serpent.
held by most
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Norito.
The priest reads aloud from folded paper in a grammar nobody has spoken for a thousand years, naming the kami, the shrine, and then the petitioner's full name and home address. The address is not bureaucracy — the request is being made about a specific person in a specific place, and the words are held to act.
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