Shrines Everywhere

Shinto is a scalable religion. A shrine typically has a courtyard with a door or stage at the back, with a bell cord hanging before it. A bit in front of the shrine is a wooden shrine gate. Everyone’s seen this sort of Japanese gate—two vertical beams, often slightly slanted toward each other, and a double horizontal beam across them, often tapered. This general plan applies whether the shrine is a vast monument to imperial ambition or a three-foot-tall personal shrine by the side of the road. The larger shrines tend to sprout smaller shrines, fractal-style, either inside the shrine courtyard or elsewhere in the shrine precinct. This sometimes happens in a very orderly, symmetric manner, especially with large, recent shrines like the Heian Shrine, a large, bright orange affair in Kyoto; elsewhere, as at most of the oldest shrines in Kyoto and Nara, there are medium-sized shrines clustered haphazardly around large shrines, and tiny shrines scattered all around.

Large shrines, whether old or new, tend to be conspicuous, but smaller shrines pop up everywhere: I saw them in narrow alleys in downtown Kyoto, between high-rise electronics stores in Akihabara, alongside snow-covered train tracks in Hokkaido. I like this. I can see why Shinto needs to be augmented with Buddhism to form a complete vision of the cosmos: no matter how much you scale it up, proclaiming NATURE! and ANCESTRY! in enormous wooden towers, you still need something more. But the smaller, more intimate side of Shinto, what I’ve come to call “Princess Mononoke Shinto,” seems to operate by noticing a scenic spot, saying “There’s a god here,” and building a shrine to that god. It doesn’t claim to be comprehensive or deeply metaphysical; in fact it’s almost physical: this is the way the natural world is put together, it says. It’s more a matter of practices and attitudes than of doctrine, and on that level I think I can understand it.