Tsumi and kegare are usually translated as sin and impurity and both translations mislead. The classical list of offences in the great purification liturgy mixes what a modern reader would call crimes with what they would call accidents and misfortunes: breaking down field boundaries, but also leprosy, being struck by lightning, and damage done by birds. What they have in common is disorder and contamination rather than guilt, and the remedy is water rather than repentance. There is no confession in Shinto, no absolution, no sacrament of penance, and no concept of an inherited stain — the human being is understood as originally clean and periodically dirtied. This has consequences the tradition is not always comfortable with: it handles wrongdoing badly, because the machinery it has is for washing rather than for reckoning, and Japanese moral vocabulary largely comes from Confucianism and Buddhism instead.