China and Japan: Confucianism, Daoism and Shinto

Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each, Laozi: The Way of the Dao and the Art of Wu Wei and Indigenous and Folk Religions: The Oldest Faiths on Earth

Ask a hundred adults in mainland China whether they belong to a religion and, by the best survey evidence, about ten will say yes. Ask the same hundred whether they visited a family grave in the last year and about seventy-five will say yes. A third believe in the Buddha or bodhisattvas. Almost half believe in feng shui.

Across the sea in Japan, the government's own religious yearbook adds up the members that shrines, temples, churches and other groups report and arrives at about 175 million believers, in a country of about 124 million people. Yet when the Pew Research Center asks individuals, more than half say they have no religion at all.

Both sets of numbers are honest. They reveal the single most important thing to understand about religion in East Asia: it is mostly not about belonging to one faith and believing its creed. It is about what you do, for whom, and on what occasion. A Japanese family can bring a baby to a Shinto shrine, hold a wedding in a chapel and bury a grandparent with Buddhist rites without feeling inconsistent. A Chinese family can follow Confucian ethics, seek a Daoist priest's blessing for a new business and chant a Buddhist sutra for the dead.

This long read untangles the traditions that make that possible: Confucianism, Daoism and Chinese folk religion in China; Shinto, and its long marriage with Buddhism, in Japan. (Buddhism itself has its own long read in this series.) For each, the tradition's own account and the historians' account are kept apart and both treated with respect.

In this long read

1. Religion without membership
2. Heaven and the ancestors: China's oldest religion
3. Confucius and the Analects
4. Mencius, Xunzi and two thousand years of Confucian China
5. Is Confucianism a religion?
6. Laozi and Zhuangzi: the classics of the Way
7. Religious Daoism: Celestial Masters, alchemy and immortals
8. The three teachings and Chinese folk religion today
9. Religion in the People's Republic
10. Kami and the ancient chronicles of Japan
11. At the shrine: how Shinto is practised
12. Kami and buddhas together, and the separation of 1868
13. State Shinto and its end
14. Yasukuni: the shrine that will not stop being argued about
15. How Japanese people "do" religion
16. Japan's new religions

Part 1 — Religion without membership

Western ideas of religion grew up around faiths that ask you to choose: to be baptised or not, to say the creed or not, to belong to one church and not another. Survey questions often carry that assumption. "What is your religion?" expects a single answer.

East Asian religious life has usually been organised differently. In 1961 the sociologist C. K. Yang, in Religion in Chinese Society, distinguished "institutional" religion, with its own clergy, scriptures and organisation (Buddhist monasteries, Daoist temples), from "diffused" religion, woven into family, village, guild and state: ancestor rites at home, the earth god at the end of the lane, the city god's festival, the emperor's sacrifices to Heaven. Most Chinese religious life was diffused. People did not "join" it; they lived inside it.

Japan shows the same pattern in a different form. Most families have historically been registered both as parishioners of a local shrine and as patrons of a Buddhist temple, and religious organisations count everyone on their rolls. That is why Japan's official figures add up to far more than the population.

In East Asia the useful question is often not "what do you believe?" but "what do you do, and for whom?"

This does not mean belief is absent or unimportant. Many Chinese and Japanese people are devout members of one tradition, and the region has produced some of the world's most profound theology and philosophy. But it explains why the old Chinese saying that the "three teachings" are one makes sense to millions, and why scholars still argue over what to count.

Part 2 — Heaven and the ancestors: China's oldest religion

The oldest Chinese writing we have is religious. In the Late Shang dynasty (c. 1250–1050 BCE), kings put questions to their ancestors and to spirits by cracking ox shoulder-blades and turtle shells with heat and reading the cracks. The questions, and sometimes the answers, were carved on the bones. Will it rain? Will the harvest be good? Is the queen's childbirth auspicious? Which ancestor is causing the king's toothache, and what sacrifice will satisfy him?

These oracle bones show a religion centred on the royal ancestors, who could intercede with a high god, Di or Shangdi, and on offerings of food, wine and animals, sometimes humans, to keep the relationship in good order. The dead were not gone. They were senior members of the family with power over its fortunes.

Heaven and its Mandate

When the Zhou overthrew the Shang in the 11th century BCE, they needed to explain why. Their answer became one of the most durable political ideas in history: Tian, Heaven, grants a Mandate to rule (tianming) to the virtuous, and withdraws it from rulers who become cruel or corrupt. The Shang had lost the Mandate by misrule; the Zhou had received it by virtue. Every later dynasty claimed the same, and every rebellion claimed that the Mandate had passed.

Heaven in early Zhou texts is something like a supreme moral power, sometimes personal, sometimes closer to the order of the cosmos. Over the following centuries, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Heaven's role was increasingly "naturalised." The emperor, the "Son of Heaven," offered sacrifices to Heaven at the winter solstice for two thousand years; the great Temple of Heaven in Beijing, built in the 15th century, is the most famous setting of that rite.

The ancestors

Underneath the state religion lay the family's. Ancestor veneration is the most widespread and long-lasting Chinese religious practice. Its core:

• Tablets with the names of the dead, kept on a family altar or in a lineage hall.
• Offerings of food, incense and, later, "spirit money" and paper goods burnt for the dead to use.
• Rites at the grave, above all at the Qingming festival in spring, when families sweep the tombs, make offerings and share a meal.
• Continuity: the dead depend on the living for offerings, and the living depend on the dead for blessing. To die without descendants to remember you was a terrible fate.

The ethic behind this is filial piety (xiao): the reverent care children owe their parents in life and after death. It is the thread that ties Chinese religion to Confucian morality, and it is where Confucius begins.

Part 3 — Confucius and the Analects

The life

Kong Qiu, known as Kongzi or "Master Kong" and in the West as Confucius, is traditionally dated 551–479 BCE. He was born near the small state of Lu, in today's Shandong. He held offices in Lu (the sources disagree on which), spent years travelling among rival states looking for a ruler who would put his ideas into practice, never found one, and in later life turned to teaching. The historian Sima Qian, writing around 100 BCE, credits him with 77 direct disciples and some 3,000 students.

His world was the late Zhou, when the old order was falling apart into warring states. His answer was not a new revelation but a recovery: the ritual and moral order of the early Zhou, as he understood it, renewed through education and personal virtue. "I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge," he says in the Analects; "I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there" (7.19, Legge).

The text

The Analects (Lunyu, "collected sayings") is a collection of short exchanges between Confucius and his disciples. The historian Ban Gu (39–92 CE) described it as compiled by his early disciples, and tradition treats it as the most direct record of his teaching. Modern scholars are less sure. Some argue it took shape much later; excavated copies from tombs dated 59 and 55 BCE show it circulating widely by the mid-1st century BCE. Its chapters probably come from different hands and different generations.

The ideas

Confucius describes his own path in one of the most famous passages in Chinese literature: "At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right" (2.4, Legge).

His golden rule is stated negatively. Asked for one word to live by, he says: "Is not RECIPROCITY such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others" (15.23).

Confucius and the spirits

What did Confucius think about gods, spirits and the dead? The Analects gives a careful, almost deliberately balanced picture.

"He sacrificed to the dead, as if they were present. He sacrificed to the spirits, as if the spirits were present." — Analects 3.12, trans. James Legge (1861)

He took ritual deeply seriously. But, the disciples record, "The subjects on which the Master did not talk, were — extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings" (7.20). When a disciple asked about serving the spirits of the dead, he replied: "While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?" And about death: "While you do not know life, how can you know about death?" (11.11). Wisdom, he says elsewhere, is "to give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them" (6.20).

Yet he also speaks of Heaven as personal and purposeful, as having given him his mission. Asked why he would not speak more, he answered with a question: "Does Heaven speak? The four seasons pursue their courses, and all things are continually being produced, but does Heaven say anything?" (17.19).

Some readers see an agnostic humanist here; others see a deeply religious man for whom reverence was shown in ritual rather than doctrine. The text supports both, which is one reason the question in Part 5 has never been settled.

On ritual, he insisted on the heart behind it. Even filial piety means nothing without reverence. People think it means supporting one's parents, he said, "But dogs and horses likewise are able to do something in the way of support; without reverence, what is there to distinguish the one support given from the other?" (2.7).

Part 4 — Mencius, Xunzi and two thousand years of Confucian China

Two followers, two views of human nature

The two great Confucian thinkers after the master disagreed about the most basic question there is.

Mencius (Mengzi), born about a century after Confucius died and active in the 4th century BCE, argued that human nature is good. Everyone has "sprouts" of the four virtues: benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom. His famous proof (Mencius 2A6): anyone who suddenly saw a small child about to fall into a well would feel alarm and compassion, not because they wanted the parents' gratitude or the neighbours' praise, but spontaneously. Goodness is in us; it has to be cultivated like a sprout, not imposed.

Xunzi (born around 310 BCE, alive in 238 BCE) argued the opposite. "Human nature is evil; what is good is artifice," his chapter 23 begins. Left to themselves, our inborn desires lead to conflict. Goodness comes from deliberate effort, wei, through teachers and the rituals of the sage kings, which reshape desire as a carpenter straightens wood.

Xunzi also wrote the most "naturalistic" account of Heaven in early Chinese thought. Heaven, he said, is constant and does not intervene in human affairs; strange events like shooting stars are only shifts in nature, not omens. And he asked a famous question about the rain dance. If people perform the sacrifice for rain and it rains, what does that mean? Nothing, he answered: it would have rained anyway. The gentleman treats the ceremony as "embellishment," a beautiful human form; common people treat it as "spiritual." To treat it as embellishment is auspicious; to treat it as spiritual is inauspicious (17.8).

Confucianism and the state

Confucianism did not win at once. The first unified empire, the Qin (221–206 BCE), favoured the harsh Legalist school. Under the Han, Confucian scholars and the Five Classics gained official standing, and Confucian learning became the training of the scholar-officials who ran the empire.

From 605 CE, under the Sui, China began selecting officials by imperial examination, a system expanded under the Tang and Song that lasted, with interruptions, for some 1,300 years until its abolition in 1905. Candidates studied the classics for years and wrote essays on them, and success could lift a family into the elite. The examinations made Confucian texts the shared curriculum of China's ruling class and, through imitation, of Korea and Vietnam.

The Song philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200) gave this curriculum its final shape. He grouped the Analects, the Mencius and two chapters of the Book of Rites as the "Four Books," and wrote commentaries on them that became the standard reading. His Neo-Confucianism answered Buddhism and Daoism on their own ground, with a full metaphysics of li (principle) and qi (vital stuff), and a programme of self-cultivation including "quiet sitting," a meditation practice. It was the orthodoxy of late imperial China, Joseon Korea and, through the Tokugawa shogunate's favour, Japan.

For two thousand years, if you wanted to govern China, you had to know Confucius by heart.

Part 5 — Is Confucianism a religion?

This is one of the oldest debates in comparative religion, and it is still live. Here are the main positions in their own best terms.

"Not a religion": a civil ethic and philosophy

Confucius did not claim revelation, founded no church, ordained no priests and said little about the afterlife. The Analects is about how to be a good son, friend, official and ruler. Its rituals honour ancestors and teachers; they do not worship a god. On this view Confucianism is an ethical, social and political philosophy, the moral grammar of Chinese civilisation, compatible with any religion or none. Many Chinese intellectuals in the 20th century took this view, as does the People's Republic today: Confucianism is not one of its five officially recognised religions.

"A religion, but a different kind"

Others answer that the question assumes a Western definition. Confucianism has sacred texts, rituals, temples (every county once had a Confucian temple, with sacrifices to the master), a cosmic order (Heaven) and a path of self-transformation toward sagehood. The philosopher Herbert Fingarette called his 1972 book Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, arguing that for Confucius ritual itself is where the holy appears: in the bow, the gift, the courteous gesture that makes human life sacred. Scholars such as Tu Weiming have described Confucianism's "religiousness" as a faith in the transformative power of human relationships rooted in Heaven. And C. K. Yang's idea of "diffused religion" places it within the wider Chinese religious system rather than outside it.

The Christian dispute that made it famous

The question first became urgent for Catholic missionaries. In the late 16th century the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, working in China, argued that the honours Chinese paid to Confucius and to ancestors were civil and social, not idolatry, so converts could continue them. Some Jesuit writers even presented Confucius as a teacher of natural theology, a sage who had reached knowledge of God by reason. Dominican and Franciscan missionaries disagreed. The "Rites Controversy" ran for more than a century. In 1715 Pope Clement XI condemned the rites; in response the Kangxi emperor restricted Christian missions. Only in 1939 did the Vatican, under Pius XII, allow Catholics to take part in ceremonies honouring Confucius and to bow before the dead.

Confucianism today

Confucian ethics remain deeply rooted in family life across East Asia, and since the 1990s there has been a revival in mainland China: classical study for children, ceremonies at Confucius temples, and official promotion of Confucian values as part of "traditional culture." Its supporters see a recovery of China's moral heritage after a century of attacks. Its critics, including some Chinese liberals and feminists, worry about its use to justify hierarchy and obedience. Whether it is a religion has become less a question of definition than a question of who gets to speak for it.

Part 6 — Laozi and Zhuangzi: the classics of the Way

The library's Laozi piece tells the classic story: an archivist at the Zhou court, weary of decline, riding west, stopped at the border pass by a guard who asks him to write down his wisdom, leaving behind a book of five thousand characters. That is the tradition's account, and it is a beautiful one. Here is what the historians add.

Who was Laozi?

The story comes from the historian Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BCE), who gives Laozi's name as Li Er, makes him an archivist who met Confucius, and records the guard Yin Xi and the five thousand characters. But Sima Qian himself was uncertain and recorded alternative identifications. Few scholars outside China now accept his account as it stands. Some think it combines several legends; some think Laozi is entirely legendary; others accept a teacher behind the name.

How old is the book?

The Daodejing (Tao Te Ching, "Classic of the Way and its Power") probably grew over time. The SEP summarises a common view: its sayings were committed to writing from the second half of the 5th century BCE, consolidated in the 4th and reached a fairly stable form by the mid-3rd century BCE. Archaeology has transformed the debate.

What the book says

The Daodejing's 81 short chapters describe the Dao, the Way, the source and pattern of all things, which cannot be grasped in words: "The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name" (ch. 1, Legge). It praises softness, yielding and emptiness. "The highest excellence is like (that of) water," which benefits all things and settles in "the low place which all men dislike" (ch. 8). And it teaches wu wei, non-forcing action: "The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do" (ch. 37).

It is also, often, a book about government, advising rulers to rule lightly. And it is pointedly critical of Confucian virtue-talk: "When the Great Tao ceased to be observed, benevolence and righteousness came into vogue" (ch. 18).

Zhuangzi

The second Daoist classic is named for Zhuang Zhou (c. 370–300 BCE). The Zhuangzi originally had 52 chapters, reduced to 33 by the editor Guo Xiang in the 3rd century CE; the first seven, the "Inner Chapters," are generally considered closest to Zhuangzi himself. Where the Daodejing is terse and oracular, the Zhuangzi is funny, strange and full of stories: a cook who carves an ox without ever dulling his knife because he follows its natural joints; a giant fish that becomes a bird; a skull that refuses to be brought back to life.

The most famous story, from chapter 2, in Herbert Giles' 1889 translation: "Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzŭ, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly." Waking, he no longer knew "whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."

And when Zhuangzi's wife died, a friend found him singing and drumming on a bowl. He had grieved at first, he explained, but then remembered that she had once not existed, had been given form and life, and was now changing again, "passing from one phase to another like the sequence of spring, summer, autumn, and winter" (ch. 18). To wail would be to show that he did not understand.

Confucius asked how to live well with others. Laozi and Zhuangzi asked how to stop getting in the way of the Way.

Part 7 — Religious Daoism: Celestial Masters, alchemy and immortals

For a long time Western scholars, following translators such as James Legge, divided Daoism into a pure early "philosophy" (daojia, "the school of the Way") and a later "religion" (daojiao, "the teaching of the Way") that they saw as a decline into magic and superstition. Since the late 1970s scholars have rejected that picture. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the split "more revealing of the Western frame of reference we use than of Daoism itself." Religious Daoism is not a corruption of the classics; it is the living tradition that has kept them, chanted them and built an entire world of practice around them.

The Celestial Masters

The first organised Daoist religion began, according to its own tradition, around 142 CE, when Zhang Daoling received revelations from Laozi, who by then was revered as a deity, the personification of the Dao. Zhang founded the Way of the Celestial Masters (Tianshi Dao) in Sichuan. Its communities were run by "libationers" who served as both priests and administrators; members confessed their sins, paid a tithe of rice (hence the early nickname, "Five Pecks of Rice"), and sought healing through confession and ritual rather than medicine. An early commentary on the Daodejing linked to the movement, the Xiang'er, survives in part in a manuscript from Dunhuang.

At about the same time, another movement inspired by the Classic of Great Peace (Taiping jing) rose in the Yellow Turban rebellion of 184 CE, which helped bring down the Han dynasty. Daoist millenarian hopes, of a coming age of great peace under a true ruler, ran through Chinese history.

Alchemy and the search for immortality

A central Daoist aim was to become a xian, an immortal or "transcendent," who has refined the body and spirit beyond death. Ge Hong (283–343), in his Master Who Embraces Simplicity (Baopuzi), argued that immortality was attainable and described the "outer alchemy" (waidan) of elixirs made from minerals such as cinnabar, a form of mercury. Some elixirs were poisonous, and Chinese history records emperors who died, it is widely believed, from the medicines meant to make them live forever.

Over time the emphasis shifted to "inner alchemy" (neidan): using breath, visualisation and meditation to refine the body's own energies, qi and its subtler forms, into an immortal embryo within. From 360 to 370 CE a young man named Yang Xi received revelations from celestial beings on Mount Mao that founded the Highest Clarity (Shangqing) school, centred on visualisation and ascent to the heavens. A generation later the Numinous Treasure (Lingbao) scriptures appeared, rich in ritual and heavily influenced by Buddhism.

The great age and after

The Tang emperors (618–907) claimed descent from Laozi, whose surname they shared, and venerated him by decree. In the 12th century Wang Zhe (1113–1170) founded the Complete Perfection (Quanzhen) school, which introduced celibate monastic life on Buddhist lines; its headquarters is still the White Cloud Temple in Beijing. The Ming emperors sponsored the first complete Daoist Canon (Daozang), finished in 1445, which holds some 1,120 titles. Today the two great orders are Quanzhen, monastic, and the Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi) order descended from the Celestial Masters, whose priests marry and serve local communities.

What Daoist priests actually do

Most Daoist practice is ritual, performed by priests for communities and families: the great jiao rites of cosmic renewal held for a temple or village, funerals to guide the dead, exorcisms, blessings for new homes and businesses, and petitions written in formal bureaucratic language to the gods of the heavenly administration. Practices that grew out of the inner-alchemy tradition, such as tai chi and qigong, have become popular worldwide, often without their religious frame.

Part 8 — The three teachings and Chinese folk religion today

"The three teachings are one"

By the Song dynasty, Daoism was taught alongside Confucianism and Buddhism as the three teachings (sanjiao). A common saying held that they were one: Confucianism to order society, Daoism to nourish the body, Buddhism to cultivate the mind. Temples were built to all three founders together, and many people moved among them as needed. Elites argued fiercely about which was superior. Ordinary people mostly used all three.

The folk religion

Beneath and around the three teachings sits the vast, uncentred practice that scholars call Chinese folk religion or popular religion. Pew counts it in the "other religions" category, which makes up only about 3 percent of mainland China's self-identified population but, because China is so large, a quarter of all the world's "other religions" adherents. In Taiwan, Pew notes, Daoists and practitioners of folk religion together make up the majority.

Its main features:

• A celestial bureaucracy. The gods are often imagined as officials: the Jade Emperor at the top, city gods as heavenly magistrates, local earth gods (Tudi Gong) as the village headmen of the spirit world. The Kitchen God watches each family and reports on it at New Year.
• Deified humans. Many gods were once people: generals, healers, virtuous women. Guan Yu, a general of the 3rd century, is worshipped as a god of loyalty, war and wealth, his red-faced statue found in police stations and restaurants alike.
• Ghosts and ancestors. The seventh lunar month is Ghost Month; on its fifteenth night (the Ghost Festival, or Pudu in Taiwan), offerings are made for wandering spirits who have no descendants to feed them.
• Divination and feng shui. Casting moon blocks or drawing fortune sticks at a temple; choosing dates and sites by astrological and geomantic rules.

Mazu

The best-loved goddess of southern China and Taiwan is Mazu, protector of seafarers. According to UNESCO, which inscribed "Mazu belief and customs" on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009, she is believed to have lived in the 10th century on Meizhou Island, off Fujian, helping her neighbours, and to have died trying to rescue shipwreck survivors; local people built a temple to her, and UNESCO counts some 5,000 Mazu temples around the world. Tradition names her Lin Moniang. In Taiwan, the annual Dajia Mazu pilgrimage carries her statue in a litter on foot for nine days between temples, followed by huge crowds.

Qingming and the year

The religious year follows the lunar calendar: Lunar New Year, when families honour ancestors and welcome the gods back from heaven; Qingming in early April, the tomb-sweeping festival; the Dragon Boat Festival; the Ghost Festival; the Mid-Autumn Festival. In 2018, roughly three-quarters of Chinese adults told the Chinese General Social Survey they had visited a family member's grave in the past year.

All figures from Pew Research Center, "Measuring Religion in China" (August 2023), which cautions that people in China may be reluctant to declare religious identity to surveyors.

In the folk religion, the gods are like officials and the dead are like relatives: you visit them, you bring gifts, you ask for help, and you keep the relationship going.

Part 9 — Religion in the People's Republic

The People's Republic of China, founded in 1949, is governed by a Communist Party whose members are required to be atheists. Its relationship with religion has passed through distinct phases, and its present policy is described very differently by the government and by its critics. Both are set out here.

Destruction and recovery

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Red Guards attacked the "Four Olds" (old ideas, culture, customs and habits). Temples, churches and mosques were closed, destroyed or turned to other uses, and clergy were persecuted. The IEP records that Beijing's roughly 300 Daoist sites were reduced to a handful. After Mao's death, the reform era restored a limited freedom of religious practice, and temples, churches and mosques reopened and multiplied.

The system

China officially recognises five religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. Each is organised through a state-approved national association and supervised by the government's religious affairs authorities. Confucianism and folk religion are not on the list; folk temples are often registered as Daoist or managed as cultural heritage.

In its 2018 white paper, China's Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief, the State Council Information Office described the system in its own terms:

• "nearly 200 million" religious believers, more than 380,000 clergy and about 144,000 registered places of worship;
• some 222,000 Buddhist and more than 40,000 Daoist clergy, with 33,500 Buddhist and 9,000 Daoist temples (the paper says Buddhist and Daoist believers are hard to count);
• about 6 million Catholics and 38 million Protestants;
• the principle that "religious groups and religious affairs are not subject to control by foreign countries";
• and a policy of "actively guiding religions in adapting to the socialist society."

The government's case is that this framework protects freedom of belief while preventing foreign interference, extremism and "evil cults" (xiejiao), and that it has supported the restoration of temples and religious life on a large scale.

The restrictions

Critics, including UN human rights bodies, human rights organisations and many religious believers, describe a system of control that has tightened since the mid-2010s under the policy known as the "sinicisation" of religion. According to Pew's 2023 report, proselytising and organised religious education for children are banned, and Falun Gong, a spiritual movement founded in the 1990s, has been completely banned since 1999. Human Rights Watch's World Report 2026 records, among other things, that in October and November 2025 nearly 30 people linked to Zion Church, one of the largest unregistered Protestant churches, were detained in seven cities and 18 formally arrested, including its founder, Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri; that new rules in September 2025 banned unauthorised religious content online; and that after the Dalai Lama's 90th birthday restrictions tightened at Tibetan monasteries.

The sharpest criticism concerns Xinjiang. In its assessment of 31 August 2022, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights concluded that the extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim groups "may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity," and noted reports of the destruction of mosques and shrines. China rejects these accusations and describes its policies as counter-terrorism and de-radicalisation.

The Catholic Church's position illustrates the balancing act. In 2018 the Holy See and the People's Republic signed a provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops, and in October 2024 they extended it for four years. Supporters see it as healing a decades-old division between "official" and "underground" Catholics; critics argue it concedes too much to the state.

Folk religion, by contrast, has seen something of a revival, sometimes tolerated as local culture, sometimes promoted as intangible heritage. Ancestor rites, temple festivals and Qingming tomb-sweeping are practised on a vast scale.

Part 10 — Kami and the ancient chronicles of Japan

What a kami is

Shinto, "the way of the kami," centres on kami: sacred beings or powers. The word is usually translated "gods" or "spirits," but neither fits well. Kami can be the great deities of the myths, such as the sun goddess Amaterasu; the spirits of particular mountains, waterfalls, rocks and ancient trees; the guardian deities of clans and places; and certain human beings, such as emperors, heroes and, in modern times, the war dead. The Japanese scholar Basil Hall Chamberlain, translating the Kojiki in 1882, noted that the word properly signifies "superior," and warned that "god" put more into it than it held.

Shinto has no founder and no single sacred book. Its central acts are not doctrines but rites: purification, offering, prayer and festival, at shrines dedicated to particular kami. Many scholars think of it as Japan's indigenous religion, continuous with prehistoric practice; others, such as John Breen and Mark Teeuwen in A New History of Shinto (2010), stress how much of what is now called "Shinto" was shaped by Buddhism and by the modern Japanese state. Both views are represented among Japanese scholars and priests.

The chronicles

The oldest Japanese books are two court chronicles from the 8th century.

The Kojiki ("Records of Ancient Matters") was completed in 712. Its preface says the empress ordered the courtier Ō no Yasumaro to write down the old traditions that a court attendant, Hieda no Are, had learnt by heart. The Nihon Shoki ("Chronicles of Japan"), completed in 720, is longer, written in a more Chinese style, and gives variant versions of many myths. For centuries the Nihon Shoki was the more studied of the two. The Kojiki became a Shinto classic mainly through the scholar Motoori Norinaga, whose 44-volume commentary, the Kojikiden, was completed in 1798.

The myths

The Kojiki opens with deities who "were born in the Plain of High Heaven when the Heaven and Earth began," while the young earth drifted "like unto floating oil." Two of them, the male Izanagi and the female Izanami, stand on the floating bridge of heaven, stir the ocean with a jewelled spear and create the islands of Japan, then give birth to many kami. Izanami dies giving birth to the fire god. Izanagi follows her to the land of the dead, sees her decaying body, and flees.

Back in the world, he says: "I have come to a hideous and polluted land, — I have! So I will perform the purification of my august person" (Kojiki Sect. X, trans. Chamberlain). As he washes in a river, kami are born from his clothes and his body; from his left eye comes Amaterasu, the Heaven-Shining-Great-August-Deity, from his right eye the moon god, and from his nose the storm god Susanoo. He gives Amaterasu the rule of the Plain of High Heaven.

Susanoo runs riot in heaven. Terrified, Amaterasu "closed [behind her] the door of the Heavenly Rock-Dwelling... Then the whole Plain of High Heaven was obscured and all the Central Land of Reed-Plains darkened. Owing to this, eternal night prevailed" (Sect. XVI). The eight hundred myriad kami gather, hang a mirror and jewels on a sacred tree, and a goddess dances so wildly that the gods roar with laughter. Curious, Amaterasu peeps out, sees her reflection in the mirror, and is drawn back into the world, and light returns.

Two themes run through these stories and into Shinto practice: purification, the washing away of pollution (kegare), especially of death; and descent, for the chronicles go on to trace the imperial line from Amaterasu's grandson, sent down to rule the islands, through the legendary first emperor Jinmu.

What historians say

The chronicles were compiled at a court building a centralised state on the Chinese model, and they served to legitimate the imperial house. The historian Tsuda Sōkichi argued in 1913 and 1919 that the early emperors were not historical and that the age-of-the-gods accounts were shaped in the 6th century to explain the imperial house's origins; in 1940 his books were banned and he was charged with insulting the imperial house. Today his critical approach is mainstream: scholars read the myths as a mix of older regional traditions and political composition, and the early "emperors" as legendary. For Shinto practitioners, the myths remain sacred narratives whose meaning does not depend on that historical question.

Shinto has no creed to recite. What it has is a mirror, a river to wash in and a set of stories about why washing matters.

Part 11 — At the shrine: how Shinto is practised

Japan has, by the Agency for Cultural Affairs' count, more than 84,000 Shinto religious corporations, most of them local shrines, from tiny roadside structures to great complexes. A visit follows a pattern that almost every Japanese person knows.

A shrine visit, step by step

1. The torii. You pass under a gate, often red, marking the boundary of sacred space. Many people bow before passing through.
2. Purification. At a stone water basin, you take a wooden ladle and rinse your left hand, then your right, then your mouth, a miniature of Izanagi's washing.
3. The offering. At the hall of worship, you drop a coin into the offering box and may ring a bell to call the kami's attention.
4. The prayer. The most common pattern is two bows, two claps, a moment of silent prayer and one more bow.
5. Charms and fortunes. Many visitors buy an omamori, an amulet for safe driving, health or exam success; draw an omikuji, a paper fortune, tying bad ones to a rack to leave the luck behind; or write a wish on a wooden ema plaque.

The kami itself is believed to reside in a sacred object, the shintai, often a mirror, sword or stone, kept hidden in the inner sanctuary. Priests (kannushi) and shrine maidens (miko) perform the daily offerings of rice, salt, water and sake, and recite norito, formal prayers in classical Japanese.

Festivals

The great communal events are matsuri, festivals, in which the kami is carried through the streets of its district in a portable shrine (mikoshi), with music, dancing, food stalls and a great deal of drinking. Many follow the farming year, from planting to harvest. Kokugakuin University's Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that, with fewer than one Japanese in ten now working in farming, festivals tied to rice-growing have tended to become civic pageants, but remain among the most significant features of Shinto and of Japanese culture.

Ise: rebuilding the sacred every twenty years

The holiest shrine in Japan is Ise Jingū, dedicated to Amaterasu. Every twenty years its main sanctuaries are rebuilt from new cypress wood on an adjacent site, with all their furnishings and sacred treasures remade, and the kami is transferred to the new shrine in a night-time ritual. This Shikinen Sengū was, by Ise's tradition, first performed in 690 for the Inner Shrine and has continued for some 1,300 years. The 61st took place in 1993 and the 62nd in 2013. Preparations for the 63rd are already under way: the first rituals were held on 2 May 2025, the traditional timber-hauling began in spring 2026, and the transfer of the kami is scheduled for October 2033.

Ise is a shrine that is always 1,300 years old and never more than twenty.

Part 12 — Kami and buddhas together, and the separation of 1868

A thousand years of combination

When Buddhism arrived in Japan in the 6th century, it did not replace the kami. It combined with them. Kokugakuin University's Encyclopedia of Shinto describes a system of shinbutsu shūgō, the "combination of kami and buddhas," with roots in the Nara period (710–794). Temples were built inside shrine compounds; monks read sutras before kami; kami were called bodhisattvas; and, apart from Ise and a few others, most shrines came under Buddhist control.

By the 10th century this was given a theory: honji suijaku, "original ground and manifest traces." The buddhas and bodhisattvas were the original, true forms; the kami were their local manifestations, appearing in Japan in order to save its people. A kami could be titled gongen, "avatar." The great shrine of Hachiman, for example, honoured a kami who was also a "Great Bodhisattva." For most of Japanese history, ordinary people did not distinguish Shinto and Buddhism as two religions at all.

In the Edo period (1603–1868), the system was tightened by the state. To root out Christianity, which the shogunate had banned, every household was required to register with a Buddhist temple that certified it was not Christian. The temple-parish (danka) system tied families to temples, which handled their funerals. At the same time, scholars of "National Learning" (kokugaku), such as Motoori Norinaga, began to argue that the pure ancient Way of the kami had been buried under foreign Buddhism and Confucianism.

The separation

The Meiji government that took power in 1868 proclaimed a "restoration of imperial rule" and a return to the age of the first emperor. On the 17th day of the third month of that year it issued the first of a series of "separation edicts" (shinbutsu bunri). Buddhist priests serving at shrines were defrocked or ordered out; Buddhist terms such as gongen were banned for kami; Buddhist statues could no longer serve as a shrine's sacred object; Hachiman stopped being a bodhisattva.

Many local officials, shrine priests and nativists read the edicts as a licence to destroy Buddhism. The movement called haibutsu kishaku, "abolish Buddhism, destroy Shakyamuni," wrecked temples and burned statues and scriptures across the country, despite central instructions that the aim was separation, not destruction. In some domains, such as Satsuma, Buddhist temples disappeared almost entirely.

The separation created the distinction most Japanese now take for granted: shrines with torii and kami on one side, temples with buddhas and graves on the other. It is a modern line drawn across an old landscape.

Part 13 — State Shinto and its end

Shrines as "ritual fundaments of the state"

Having separated shrines from Buddhism, the Meiji state made them its own. In 1871 shrines were declared the "ritual fundaments of the state," hereditary priesthoods were abolished and a national ranking of shrines created. A short-lived campaign to make Shinto a national creed failed. The government then hit upon a different formula: shrines are not religious. In 1882 priests of the national shrines were barred from preaching and from conducting funerals, and in 1900 a separate Shrine Bureau took over shrine administration from the bureau handling religions. Shrine rites, the government argued, were patriotic ceremonies honouring the nation's ancestors, which every citizen could perform whatever his religion.

This let the state require participation in shrine rites while claiming to respect freedom of religion, which Article 28 of the Meiji Constitution (1889) granted, as the Encyclopedia of Shinto puts it, "after a fashion." Schoolchildren bowed before portraits of the emperor; shrines were built across Japan's empire in Taiwan, Korea, Sakhalin, Manchuria and the Pacific; and a nationwide programme of shrine mergers, from the end of Meiji into the Taishō period, closed about half of the country's roughly 200,000 shrines. In 1937 the Ministry of Education published Kokutai no hongi ("Fundamentals of Our National Polity"), centred on the divine descent of the emperor.

Scholars do not agree on what "State Shinto" was. The Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that the term only came into common use with the occupation authorities' Shinto Directive of 1945, that the system grew from a series of separate laws without any overall legal framework, and that it was, as a system, "extremely unstable." Some historians see State Shinto as effectively Japan's state religion from 1868 to 1945, the ideological core of militarism. Others, including many Shinto scholars, argue that the shrines themselves were a fairly small and underfunded part of the state, and that the real engine of wartime ideology was the emperor cult promoted through schools and the army.

1945: the end

After Japan's defeat, the Allied occupation issued the Shinto Directive on 15 December 1945, ordering the separation of shrines from the state, which it held had been linked to "ultra-nationalism and militarism." On 1 January 1946 the emperor issued a rescript, commonly called the "Humanity Declaration," rejecting the idea that he was a living god. On 3 February 1946 the shrines organised themselves as a private religious body, the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honchō), which today includes the vast majority of Japan's shrines and regards Ise as its spiritual centre.

The 1947 Constitution made the separation law. Article 20 says that "No religious organization shall receive any privileges from the state, nor exercise any political authority" and that "The state and its organs shall refrain from religious education or any other religious activity"; Article 89 bars public money for religious institutions.

The boundary is still argued over in court. In 1977 the Supreme Court ruled that the city of Tsu could pay for a Shinto groundbreaking ceremony before building a gymnasium, on the grounds that it was a secular custom; in 1993 it upheld a city's support for a memorial rite for the war dead. Supporters of such rulings see shrine rites as part of Japanese culture shared by all; critics, including many Christians, Buddhists and liberals, see a slow return of the prewar formula that Shinto is "not a religion" and so exempt from separation.

Part 14 — Yasukuni: the shrine that will not stop being argued about

What it is

Yasukuni Shrine, in central Tokyo, was established on 29 June 1869, by the will of the Emperor Meiji, as the Tokyo Shōkonsha, a shrine "to invite the spirits" of those who had died fighting for the emperor in the civil war that brought him to power. It took the name Yasukuni, "peaceful country," in 1879. No remains are buried there. Instead, the names of the dead are enshrined as kami.

By its own account, the shrine now enshrines "more than 2,466,000 divinities": soldiers who died in Japan's wars from the 1850s to 1945, together with civilian workers, nurses, schoolgirls involved in relief operations, students mobilised to work in factories, people who died in Soviet labour camps, "Taiwanese and Korean people who died as Japanese," and those "labeled war criminals and executed after being tried by the Allies." In the shrine's view, all who sacrificed their lives for the nation are to be honoured equally. Its museum, the Yūshūkan, presents Japan's modern wars from that perspective.

The turning points

Sources: Yasukuni Shrine; nippon.com, "Yasukuni Shrine: the Basics" (2014); Jiji Press via nippon.com (19 October 2026).

The positions

The controversy has at least four sides, and each deserves its strongest statement.

The shrine and its supporters, including many bereaved families and conservatives, say Yasukuni is where the war dead were promised they would be honoured, and where their families have mourned them for generations. Every nation honours its fallen; a prime minister paying respects to those who died for the country is no more glorifying war than a president laying a wreath at a national cemetery. In Shinto, they add, the dead are purified by death, and judging which of them to honour is not for the living. The shrine has refused requests to remove the Class A enshrinements, saying enshrined spirits cannot be separated. Visits by Japanese leaders, on this view, are a domestic matter.

China and South Korea, and many others in Asia, see the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals and the Yūshūkan's narrative as evidence that Japan has not faced up to its wars of aggression and colonial rule, in which millions of their people died. Visits by Japanese leaders are therefore read as endorsing that view of history. In 2005 large anti-Japanese demonstrations in China included protests against the visits.

Constitutional critics within Japan argue that official visits breach the separation of religion and state in Article 20. As early as 1955 the government itself said ministers should not visit in an official capacity because there was "an undeniable possibility" that it would be unconstitutional. Visits have continued in both "official" and "private" capacities, and the argument has gone through the courts.

Some families of the dead, including some Christian, Buddhist, Taiwanese and Korean families, object that their relatives were enshrined without their consent, as kami of a religion they did not share, and in a shrine they associate with the empire that conscripted them.

Proposals to defuse the issue, such as removing the Class A enshrinements or building a secular national memorial, have repeatedly failed. A government panel recommended a non-religious memorial in 2002; it was never built. The Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery nearby holds the remains of unidentified war dead, but it is not a substitute in the eyes of those who honour Yasukuni.

To one Japanese family, Yasukuni is where they go to talk to a grandfather. To a family in Nanjing or Seoul, it is where Japan honours the men who planned the war that killed theirs. Both experiences are real.

Part 15 — How Japanese people "do" religion

The life cycle

A saying often quoted, half-jokingly, sums up Japanese religious life: born Shinto, married Christian, die Buddhist. It is a simplification, but it captures something true about how different traditions serve different moments.

Birth and childhood belong to the shrines. Kokugakuin University's Encyclopedia of Shinto describes the baby's first visit as a prayer for the child's growth and, originally, a way of acknowledging the child as a new parishioner of the local kami. Shichigosan grew more elaborate from the Taishō period, and in Tokyo many families go to Meiji Jingū.

New Year is the busiest time at shrines. Many people visit at midnight, hearing temple bells ring out the old year and then praying at a shrine. Meiji Jingū in Tokyo, Fushimi Inari in Kyoto and Sumiyoshi Taisha in Osaka draw some of the largest crowds.

Weddings show how flexible Japanese religion is. Shinto weddings in their modern form only began in the Meiji period, influenced by Christian ceremonies, and spread after the wedding of the Crown Prince in 1900. In recent decades the "chapel wedding," often in a hotel or wedding hall, with a hired officiant, has been the single most popular style, though most couples are not Christian; the 1.9 million Christian adherents the yearbook counts make up under 2 percent of the population. In Recruit's Zexy wedding survey of couples who married between April 2023 and March 2024, an estimated 46.9 percent nationally held a Christian-style ceremony.

Death is mainly the territory of Buddhism. The Edo-period temple registration system tied every household to a temple, and that link survives in the family grave, the Buddhist altar (butsudan) in the home, and the cycle of memorial services. Critics within and outside Buddhism speak of "funeral Buddhism," temples that live from rites for the dead rather than teaching. Defenders reply that care for the dead and comfort for the bereaved is the most human thing a religion can do.

Belonging versus believing

Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs publishes an annual count of what religious organisations report. Its survey for the end of 2024 found:

Japan's population that year was about 124 million. The agency notes that each organisation defines and counts its members in its own way. Individual surveys tell a different story: Pew estimated that 57 percent of Japanese were religiously unaffiliated in 2020, up from a decade before.

Both views are fair. Many Japanese who say they have "no religion" (mushūkyō) mean that they do not belong to a religious organisation or hold a creed, while still visiting shrines, keeping a Buddhist altar for their parents and buying a charm before an exam. To them these are customs, not religion. To scholars of religion, customs like these are exactly what religion often is.

Asked "Are you religious?", many Japanese say no. Asked "Will you visit the shrine at New Year?", many of the same people say of course.

Part 16 — Japan's new religions

Since the end of the Edo period, Japan has produced hundreds of "new religions" (shinshūkyō). The Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that a standard dictionary of them lists over 300, about half derived from Shinto and many others from Buddhism. Most began with a charismatic founder, often a woman or a farmer, who received revelations from a kami or spirit; most offered healing, practical benefits and a clear ethic to people uprooted by modernisation.

Tenrikyō, founded by Nakayama Miki (1798–1887), a farm woman whom the movement holds was possessed by God the Parent and became the deity's living shrine, was Japan's largest new religion from the Meiji era until 1945. Watched closely and attacked in the press as a pernicious cult, it was forced to fit its rituals within State Shinto, became an independent religion in 1908, and after the war returned to its founder's original teachings. It left the federation of sect Shinto in 1970. Its headquarters city, Tenri in Nara Prefecture, is built around its sanctuary.

Sōka Gakkai, founded in 1930, is a lay Buddhist movement based on the teachings of the 13th-century monk Nichiren and centred on chanting Nam-myōhō-renge-kyō, the title of the Lotus Sutra. It grew enormously after the war, and the political party Kōmeitō, which it backs, was founded in 1964. Risshō Kōsei Kai (1938), another Lotus Sutra movement, is known for its interfaith work.

When new religions turn dangerous

Two cases have shaped how Japan thinks about religion.

Aum Shinrikyō, founded by Asahara Shōkō as a yoga group in 1984 and renamed in 1987, blended Buddhist, Hindu and apocalyptic Christian ideas. In June 1994 its members released sarin nerve gas in Matsumoto, killing eight people. On 20 March 1995 they released sarin on five Tokyo subway trains, killing 13 people and injuring some 6,000. Asahara was arrested in May 1995 and sentenced to death; 13 members received death sentences, and Asahara and six others were executed on 6 July 2018.

The Unification Church, a Korean-founded movement now formally called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, came under intense scrutiny after former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō was shot dead in July 2022. His killer, Yamagami Tetsuya, said he blamed the church for his family's ruin after his mother made large donations to it, and believed Abe was linked to it. In 2022 Japan passed a law against unjust solicitation of donations by religious groups. In March 2025 the Tokyo District Court ordered the church dissolved as a religious corporation; on 21 January 2026 the Nara District Court sentenced Yamagami to life imprisonment; and on 4 March 2026 the Tokyo High Court upheld the dissolution order, stripping the church of its legal status as a religious corporation in Japan and starting the liquidation of its assets. The church disputes the rulings and says its members are being persecuted for their faith.

These cases revived an old Japanese question in a new form. The Meiji state once decided which religions were legitimate and which were "pernicious," and the postwar constitution was written to stop the state from doing so. How far should a democratic state go in policing religious groups that harm their members? Some, including victims' advocates, argue Japan has done too little, too late; others, including some scholars of religion and religious organisations, warn that the dissolution sets a precedent that could be turned against other minority faiths.

The takeaway

China's oldest religion was a relationship with ancestors and with Heaven, which granted a Mandate to the virtuous. Confucius turned that inheritance into an ethic of humaneness, ritual and filial piety, so restrained about the spirits that scholars still argue whether Confucianism is a religion. Laozi and Zhuangzi taught the Way of yielding and spontaneity, and from the 2nd century CE religious Daoism built on them a world of priests, rituals, alchemy and immortals. Over centuries these "three teachings" and Buddhism blended into a folk religion of ancestors, local gods and goddesses like Mazu, practised by hundreds of millions who rarely call themselves religious, under a Chinese state that recognises five religions and tightly controls them. In Japan, the kami of the ancient chronicles and the buddhas lived together for a thousand years until the Meiji state separated them in 1868 and made shrines "non-religious" instruments of the nation, a system dismantled in 1945 but argued over still, above all at Yasukuni. Today most Japanese, like most Chinese, live their religion through rites at the right moments: a shrine at birth, a chapel at marriage, a temple at death.

Try this: next time you see a family photograph from East Asia, a shrine visit, a grave-sweeping, a wedding, try asking not "which religion is this?" but "who is being honoured, and what relationship is being kept up?" Then think of one ritual in your own life, a birthday, a toast, a visit to a grave, that you do without calling it religion, and ask the same question.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Pew Research Center, "Measuring Religion in China" (30 August 2023): CGSS 2018, CFPS 2016 and 2018 figures, the five recognised religions, bans on proselytising and on Falun Gong. Pew, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" and "Other Religions" chapter (9 June 2025): China 90% and Japan 57% unaffiliated; folk religion, Daoism and Mazu in "other religions"; Taiwan.
- State Council Information Office of the PRC, China's Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief (April 2018).
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, China chapter; OHCHR, Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (31 August 2022); Holy See Press Office communiqué on the extension of the provisional agreement (22 October 2024).
- James Legge (trans.), Confucian Analects (1861; Project Gutenberg #3330): 2.4, 2.7, 3.12, 6.20, 7.19, 7.20, 11.11, 15.23, 17.19. Legge (trans.), The Tao Teh King (1891; Gutenberg #216): chs. 1, 8, 18, 37. Herbert A. Giles (trans.), Chuang Tzŭ (1889; Gutenberg #59709): chs. 2, 18.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Confucius" (dates, disciples, Analects composition and excavated copies, Mandate of Heaven, Zhu Xi), "Mencius" (2A6, 6A6), "Xunzi" (23.1a, 17.7, 17.8), "Laozi" (Sima Qian, dating, Guodian, Mawangdui, Wang Bi, Celestial Masters, Xiang'er).
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Daoist Philosophy" (daojia/daojiao, Zhang Daoling c. 142 CE, Taiping jing and Yellow Turbans, Ge Hong, Shangqing 360–370, Lingbao, Tang, the three teachings, Quanzhen, Daozang, Cultural Revolution, Zhuangzi's dates and chapters).
- UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, "Mazu belief and customs" (inscribed 2009). C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society (1961); Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (1972). Dates for the imperial examinations (605–1905), the oracle bones and the Rites Controversy (1715, 1939) follow standard reference accounts, including George Minamiki, The Chinese Rites Controversy (1985).
- Basil Hall Chamberlain (trans.), Kojiki (1882, public domain; Wikisource): Introduction (712, 720), Preface, Sects. I, X, XI, XVI.
- Kokugakuin University, Encyclopedia of Shinto (d-museum.kokugakuin.ac.jp/eos): entries "Shinbutsu Bunri," "Honjisuijakusetsu," "State Shintō," "Modern and Contemporary Shinto," "Problems of religion and government," "Jinja Honchō," "Shikinensengū," "Hatsumōde," "Hatsumiyamōde," "Shichigosan," "Shinzenkekkon," "Tenrikyō," "Kojikiden," "Shinto in the Early Modern Period," "History (Modern) Research" (Tsuda Sōkichi; Kokutai no hongi).
- Ise Jingū, schedule of the 63rd Shikinen Sengū (isejingu.or.jp).
- Agency for Cultural Affairs, Religious Statistics Survey results (published December 2025; figures as of 31 December 2024). World Bank, population of Japan (data updated October 2026). Recruit, Zexy Wedding Trend Survey 2024 (October 2024).
- Yasukuni Shrine, "About Yasukuni Shrine" and "History"; nippon.com, "Yasukuni Shrine: the Basics" (10 September 2014), "Postwar Japan-China Relations: A Timeline" (2020), "Japan PM Takaichi Skips Yasukuni Shrine Visit" (Jiji Press, 19 October 2026).
- nippon.com, "Aum Shinrikyō: A Timeline" (2018), "Yamagami Sentencing Reveals Japan's Troubled Response to Religious Cults" (4 February 2026) and "Japan Timeline for March 2026"; Founding dates from Sōka Gakkai, "Our History" (sokaglobal.org), Risshō Kōsei-kai, "Basic Information" (rk-world.org) and Komeito, "History" (komei.or.jp). National Diet Library, Birth of the Constitution of Japan: the Imperial Rescript of 1 January 1946.

Go deeper
- 📘 The Analects of Confucius — Edward Slingerland (trans.) (2003). A modern translation with selections from traditional Chinese commentaries, so you see how the text has been read for two thousand years.
- 📘 Daoism and Chinese Culture — Livia Kohn (2001). A clear history of religious Daoism, from the Celestial Masters to today; corrects the "philosophy versus superstition" picture.
- 📘 The Souls of China — Ian Johnson (2017). A journalist's year inside temples, pilgrimages and house churches in today's China; the best way to see the folk revival up close.
- 📘 Shinto: A History — Helen Hardacre (2017). The authoritative history, from the ancient chronicles to Yasukuni and the Association of Shinto Shrines.
- 📘 A New History of Shinto — John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (2010). A shorter, provocative account of how "Shinto" was made, through case studies of shrines.
- 📘 Practically Religious — Ian Reader and George J. Tanabe (1998). On charms, prayers and "this-worldly benefits": how Japanese religion actually works for ordinary people.
- 🌐 Kokugakuin University, Encyclopedia of Shinto — free, scholarly entries on every shrine, rite and term, written by Japanese specialists.
- 🌐 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Laozi" — the state of scholarship on the man, the text and the manuscripts.
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each; Laozi; Bodhidharma; Indigenous and Folk Religions; Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It; Pilgrimage; and in this series, Buddhism: The Path of Awakening.