Recently, I read Faith in Mount Fuji, by Janine Anderson Sawada. (That’s an affiliate link to Amazon.) I found the book extremely interesting, mostly because it is about the early years of a tradition that was included in Shinto at the Meiji Revolution, but which is quite different from contemporary mainstream Jinja Shinto. (I believe that the Sect Shinto groups derived from this tradition are still active, but I do not think they are very large.) If you are interested in the historical diversity of religious practice in Japan, I strongly recommend it. If you are only interested in contemporary Shinto, it’s not really for you.
One of the reasons why this book interested me is that the tradition is hard to categorise. It regarded Mount Fuji as the central deity (using “kami” here would be tendentious) of the world, a dual-gendered parent of all things, and does not seem to have paid much attention to other, more conventional Shinto kami. Aspects of its practice and doctrine were clearly deeply influenced by Buddhism, but contemporary Buddhists and Shugenja appear to have seen it as a different practice, and to have been less than entirely happy with it encroaching on their territory. And, as I mentioned, the Meiji authorities decided that the late-nineteenth century inheritors of this tradition were Shinto.
But was it?
As I have said on many occasions, this is not an easy question to answer. I think we first have to answer the question of why we want to know whether a certain practice is Shinto. Do we want to know whether its religious centres can join Jinja Honchō? Do we want to know whether it is fundamentally the same as the practice of national rituals promulgated by the Japanese state around 1925? Do we want to know whether it is usefully considered as part of the native religious traditions of Japan? There are other options, but even these three will give us some odd results. The first, for example, will have no Shinto existing before the twentieth century. The second would have Shinto as a very brief aberration in Japanese history, born around 1900 and gone by 1950. The third would probably exclude State Shinto, but might well include Tendai Buddhism and the Kakurë Kirishitan (“Hidden Christians”) of Kyūshū.
Of course, we want a shared use of the word “Shinto”, so that communication can happen. Some differences are inevitable, but deep and profound differences will just lead to confusion. This is why I am opposed to definitions of “Shinto” that have the consequence that it does not exist today, and did not exist for most of Japanese history. That is simply too far away from how most Japanese people use the word.
We could say something like “practices that venerate entities seen as rooted in Japan (although they may have come from elsewhere originally, or be identified with entities that also exist elsewhere) through ritualised activities that draw on Japanese traditions”. This would include State Shinto, as it venerated the Tennō, even if it failed to believe in the other kami, and would, I believe, exclude the Kakurë Kirishitan, as they did not see Christ as rooted in Japan. I am not sure what it would say about Tendai, but I think it would exclude it. On the other hand, it would include modern mainstream Jinja Shinto, and a lot of historical practices that are often seen as Shinto, including the ones described by Sawada.
Even if something like that works as a “definition” of the word “Shinto”, there is still the question of whether the practices picked out have enough internal unity to be interesting as a whole. Again, this might depend on what you are doing. If you are studying international comparative religion, then it probably is sufficiently unified. You can compare with the equivalent class in Korea, Spain, and the USA, and see how the practices differ. On the other hand, if you are just studying Japanese religiously inflected practices, it probably isn’t, because it covers a huge part of the field that you want to study. You probably want to draw finer distinctions.
On this blog, and in my essays, I am basically introducing mainstream Jinja Shinto, both its present situation and what it sees as its history. That is not necessarily a terribly coherent category, in the end, but I think it is one that people with an interest in contemporary Japanese practice will want to know about. I certainly do.