What is described is not absolution and practitioners are fairly precise about it. You arrive carrying kegare simply from having lived — from illness, contact with death, disorder, the accumulated residue of ordinary days — and the water at the basin and the walk up the shaded approach take it off. The word people reach for is light, or clear, rather than forgiven. Because tsumi is a condition rather than a verdict, there is nothing to confess and nobody to confess to, and the whole apparatus of guilt, penance and absolution that structures the equivalent experience in the Abrahamic traditions is simply absent. The consequence is that Shinto handles ritual defilement extremely well and moral wrongdoing hardly at all — a person who has done something genuinely bad can be purified without the question of what they did ever arising. Japanese ethical vocabulary came from elsewhere, and this is one of the clearest places to see the division of labour.