Shinto and the Japanese Kami

This Element examines the Japanese experience of the divine through the concept of kami, understood not as transcendent authorities but as vital presences embedded in nature, community, and the human body. Rather than presenting Shinto as a fixed religion, it traces the historical formation of kami worship and its expression in myth, ritual, and festival. These practices reveal a psychosomatic mode of religiosity in which body and spirit are interwoven through processes of concealment, gestation, and renewal. Such processes situate the experience of the divine within the generative depths of existence, so that Japanese ritual life integrates chthonic dimensions through embodied participation. Philosophically, the study moves beyond the common characterization of Shinto as pantheistic, proposing instead a panentheistic framework as a more flexible interpretive lens. In this view, corporeality becomes the experiential medium through which kami are manifested. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.