Eight million kami — meaning uncountable.
Yaoyorozu no kami. The number is a figure of speech for too many to list, and the category is open: a mountain, a waterfall, a fox, a sword, a dead scholar, a rice field and a company founder can all be kami, and new ones are still being made.
Yaoyorozu literally reads eight hundred myriads, and it functions the way a countless does in English — an assertion that the list cannot be closed. The category is genuinely open in both directions. A kami can be a natural feature, a phenomenon, an ancestor, a historical person, an abstract force of growth, or an object; Motoori Norinaga's working definition was anything at all that inspired awe, including things that are bad. New kami are still made — Meiji Jingu enshrines an emperor who died in 1912, Nogi Shrine a general who followed him in suicide, and there are shrines to company founders and to horses. Nothing about the system requires a hierarchy, and the one the Kojiki imposes is an imperial court's attempt to organise material that resisted it. This is why the question a Western reader most wants answered — is it monotheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic — does not get a clean answer.
Kami means, first of all, the deities of heaven and earth that appear in the ancient records, and the spirits enshrined in their shrines — and also birds, beasts, trees, plants, seas, mountains and whatever else is out of the ordinary and inspires awe. It is not only the noble and the good; evil and strange things, if they are extraordinary, are also called kami.
Motoori Norinaga, Kojiki-den, completed 1798 (rendered)The definition that has never been improved on, and it makes no moral requirement.
The same ground, other faiths
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