Shinto is unusual among world religions for the minimal role death plays in its core concerns. The kami — the innumerable spirits of forests, rivers, mountains, ancestors, emperors, and rice — are alive in the world, and the work of the tradition is to stay in proper relation to them, especially through festivals, shrines, and the purification rituals that wash away kegare, the accumulated pollution of ordinary life, which includes contact with death. Death itself is not a central theological concern. What happens to the dead is addressed less in doctrine than in practice, and the practice for most of Japanese history has been to let Buddhism handle it.
The older stratum of Japanese religion, preserved in the eighth-century Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, does describe an underworld: Yomi-no-kuni, the Land of Yomi, a place of darkness and decay reached through an underground passage. The goddess Izanami, who with Izanagi gave birth to the islands of Japan and many of the kami, died giving birth to the fire kami. Izanagi traveled to Yomi to retrieve her. He found her in the dark, could not see her, and against her wishes lit a torch — and saw her body covered in maggots, hideous, decaying, surrounded by the thunder deities of rot. He fled in horror. She pursued him. At the border between Yomi and the living world he blocked the passage with a great boulder. From opposite sides of the boulder they ended their marriage: she declared she would kill a thousand people a day, and he declared he would have fifteen hundred born. This is how death and birth entered the world.
What is striking about the Yomi account is its insistence that death pollutes. Izanagi, returning, washes himself in a river to purify the contamination, and from his washings three great kami are born: Amaterasu the sun goddess, Tsukiyomi the moon, Susanoo the storm. Purification after contact with death is thus literally generative of the divine order. The treatment of the dead in Japanese practice inherits this: funerals are occasions of careful ritual cleansing, and until the Buddhist synthesis the body was often buried far from the community's daily space.
The Buddhist synthesis, beginning in the sixth century, is what gave most Japanese their actual operative afterlife: the Pure Land of Amida Buddha (Jodo), rebirth in Amitabha's paradise through faith and recitation, from which liberation is attained. For over a thousand years, ordinary Japanese have practiced Shinto for the affairs of life — weddings, births, harvests, New Year's shrine visits — and Buddhism for the affairs of death. The two coexist without resolution.
The quiet Shinto layer underneath, however, still operates. Ancestral spirits (sorei) are believed to return home during Obon in August, guided by fires lit at gravesites and doorways, welcomed at family altars, and sent back with lanterns floated down rivers at festival's end. What distinguishes Shinto eschatology is not what it teaches about death but what it teaches about continuity: the dead become kami of the household, continuing to participate in the life of the family, and the family remains in relation to them through the small daily gestures that Shinto makes sacred.
