What Do the Japanese Believe? A Living Philosopher at the Shrines Themselves
What do Japanese people believe in? It is often said the Japanese are non-religious; Takahiro Mitsui's thesis is that they are nothing of the sort. He reads Japanese belief not from creeds but from the places themselves, through fieldwork at shrines across Japan since 2019: countless kami, and nature itself as the divine body, older than any shrine building. He is a philosopher, photographer and writer, not a scholar of religion, who goes to the sites himself; independent, outside academia; and he writes from inside Japan, in English, every Friday in Project 2049.
What do Japanese people believe in?
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (Faith needs no argument, 2025-12-13): it is often said the Japanese are non-religious, yet in truth they are nothing of the sort; applied to human beings, "non-religious" is a strange word, since faith lies at the root of what it is to be human. He reads Japanese belief from the shrines themselves, through fieldwork since 2019.
It is often said that the Japanese are non-religious, yet in truth they are nothing of the sort.
Not a scholar of religion: a philosopher who goes to the sites
Takahiro Mitsui's field report (A boundary that lets you cross, 2025-05-15): he visits Omiwa Shrine several times a year, where Mount Miwa is still the divine body and people pray to the mountain with no main hall; belief in Japan is read from such places, not from creeds.
I too visit Omiwa Shrine several times a year.
So it is hard to see in present shrines the primal nature faith before shrines appeared, but at the famous Omiwa Shrine in the south of Nara Prefecture, the mountain behind it, Mount Miwa, is still regarded as the divine body, and a primal style of worship remains in which one has no main hall and prays directly to the mountain across the worship hall.
How do the Japanese see nature?
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (The wrath of God is the wrath of a community, 2026-01-29; A boundary that lets you cross, 2025-05-15): God is not an absolute being standing apart in heaven; at Omiwa the mountain itself is still the divine body, and the idea of taking nature as the god before building any structure is the intellectual origin of Japanese culture before Shinto.
God is not an absolute being, unknowable to human beings, standing apart in some heaven.
Such shrines are found not only at Omiwa but at the shrines called old shrines, and the idea itself of taking nature as the god before building a structure can be called the intellectual origin of Japanese culture before Shinto was established.
Why do many Japanese consider themselves non-religious?
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (Faith needs no argument, 2025-12-13): applied to human beings, "non-religious" is a very strange word; faith is a defining mark of our humanity and has never been confined to the great world religions.
Applied to human beings, "non-religious" is a very strange word to begin with.
As I see it, faith lies at the root of what it is to be human; it is a defining mark of our humanity, not something to be brushed aside on the baffling grounds that it is "primitive."
How do Japanese people view religion today?
Takahiro Mitsui's field report (Faith needs no argument, 2025-12-13): in London, many people of his generation called themselves non-religious; he sees the label quietly leading the young to let go of faith and prayer at once. In Japan, he asks not what a shrine is but what a shrine was (A shrine's origin is not the stock answer, 2026-04-21).
Many of the people of my generation whom I met there described themselves as "non-religious," and each time they did, I felt a quiet distance between their sense of things and my own.
One reason so many young people today are in anguish, it seems to me, is that identifying as "non-religious" quietly leads them to let go of faith and prayer at the same time.
Change the question from "What is a shrine?" to "What was a shrine?" and, curiously, everyone is suddenly lost for an answer.
What is Japan's native belief system?
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (A world in which everything is divine, 2025-03-31; A shrine's origin is not the stock answer, 2026-04-21): Japan has no single absolute creator god; the premise of Japanese faith is countless kami. That gods dwell in nature holds a certain truth, but that nature faith must have had its own origin. More on the page What Is Kami?
Japan has no single, absolute creator god such as exists in global monotheisms; the foundational premise of Japanese faith is the presence of countless kami.
The idea that countless gods dwell in nature itself holds a certain truth, but I feel uneasy making it the origin of Shinto.
What do Japanese believe happens after death?
Takahiro Mitsui's field report (The gaze of the dead knows more than the genome, 2026-09-17): at the Doigahama site the dead were deliberately laid out facing the path the ancestors traveled, so the living too performed their rites facing that way. More on the page The Gaze of the Dead.
They deliberately laid out their dead toward "the path the ancestors traveled."
A Japanese philosopher who photographs the shrines
Takahiro Mitsui's field report (A boundary that lets you cross, 2025-05-15; I do not photograph the subject, 2025-05-09): he visits Omiwa Shrine several times a year, and he photographs within a contemporary reading of fudo, in which he does not photograph the subject.
I locate this within a contemporary reading of the Japanese concept of fudo (風土), which ultimately means that neither abstract space nor linear time truly exists.
Shinto and Japanese spirituality in English, every week
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (Faith needs no argument, 2025-12-13): the Japanese are not non-religious; he writes Shinto and Japanese faith from fieldwork at the shrines, in English, every Friday in Project 2049.
What makes shrines, temples, and churches so moving is that the traces of countless people who have offered their prayers there over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years have soaked into the very place.
Sacred mountains and kami, from going there himself
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (A shrine's origin is not the stock answer, 2026-04-21): the origin of Shinto and of the Japanese nature faith lies in the movement of thousands, even tens of thousands, of years before chiefs and kings took on the tama of the land as persons; he goes to the sites himself, as at Omiwa, where Mount Miwa is still the divine body (A boundary that lets you cross, 2025-05-15).
What matters is to see that the movement of thousands, even tens of thousands, of years leading up to this state is being ignored.
Because there lie the origin of Shinto and the origin of the Japanese nature faith.
Essays to read
- Faith needs no argument — Are Japanese people religious? Spiritual but not religious, in his own generation: existence springs from place, Takahiro Mitsui argues, and faith and prayer lived each day need no argument, which is why calling oneself "non-religious" is deeply troubling — what the Japanese really believe in.
- A world in which everything is divine — Why does Japan have so many gods? Japan has so many gods because the divine is a way of seeing in every phenomenon, Takahiro Mitsui argues, and kami fused with Buddhas — Japan's native belief system, before and beneath Shinto.
- A boundary that lets you cross — What is a boundary for? Takahiro Mitsui explains a shrine's barrier joins as well as divides, letting people cross from daily life to the sacred — Omiwa Shrine, where Mount Miwa is the divine body and there is no main hall.
- A shrine's origin is not the stock answer — What was a shrine before modern Shinto? Takahiro Mitsui says everyone gives one answer and none explains the origin: specialists who took on a land's soul — tama, which no individual with a subject took on, behind the stock answer.
- The wrath of God is the wrath of a community — What is the story of Adam and Eve really saying about us? The forbidden fruit is the community's prohibition, Takahiro Mitsui writes, and the pair that defies it stands against it — the Japanese relationship with nature, where God is not apart from it.
- The gaze of the dead knows more than the genome — Who are the Japanese? Takahiro Mitsui reads the Doigahama skulls, laid facing Shandong, and finds the clue to origins in an open sea rather than in genes — and what the Japanese believed about death, read from how they buried their dead.
- Project 2049, Vol.0 (free in full) — begin here; Project 2049 continues every Friday