Shinto's existential problem is not secularisation but demography. The parish model requires households living nearby who sweep, pay and carry, and rural Japan is losing those households at speed; the national population has been falling since 2008 and the decline is concentrated in exactly the places where the small shrines are. Surveys by shrine bodies and by researchers have put the proportion of shrines without a resident priest at well over half, with tens of thousands maintained only by ageing neighbourhood associations, and widely cited projections have suggested a large fraction could be lost within a few decades. What happens in practice is quiet: the festival is cancelled one year for lack of carriers, then permanently; the sweeping stops; the roof goes; the shrine is merged into a neighbour on paper. The kami is not held to go anywhere. There is no doctrinal crisis in any of this and no argument to be won, which is part of why it attracts so little attention outside Japan.