Editing Shintoism (section)

== Characteristics ==

From wikipedia... the most immediately striking theme in the Shinto religion is a great love and reverence for nature. Thus, a waterfall, the moon, or just an oddly shaped rock might come to be regarded as a kami; so might charismatic persons or more abstract entities like growth and fertility. As time went by, the original nature-worshipping roots of the religion, while never lost entirely, became attenuated and the kami took on more reified and anthropomorphic forms, with a formidable corpus of myth attached to them. (See also: Japanese mythology.) The kami, however, are not transcendent deities in the usual Western and Indian sense of the word. Although divine, they are close to humanity; they inhabit the same world as we do, make the same mistakes as we do, and feel and think the same way as we do. Those who died would automatically be added to the rank of kami regardless of their human doings (It is thought that one can become a ghost under certain circumstances involving unsettled disputes in life). Belief is not a central aspect in Shinto, and proper observation of ritual is more important than whether one "truly believes" in the ritual. Thus, even those believing other religions may be venerated as kami after death, if there are Shinto believers who wish them to be.

This transmogrification after death creates ambiguities that are being debated even today amid the controversy surrounding former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's (小泉 純一郎 Koizumi Jun'ichirō) annual visits to Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese war-dead. While the visits are widely viewed as an act of political swagger on the part of Japanese conservatives who eschew expressions of regret for past Japanese military aggression — and take place against the backdrop of historic reassertions of Japanese militarism by the current government — some Japanese, even liberals and moderates, wonder if opposition to the visits is based on a misunderstanding of Japanese spirituality. They explain that there is a kind of "apotheosis" when deceased become kami; since Japan's war-dead are already kami, then, paying respects to their spirits at the shrine is not the same as honoring specific acts during their lives. This view is not shared by Japan's neighbors, who have been on the receiving end of these acts.