Lafcadio Hearn did not come to Japan to study Shinto from a library chair. Between 1890 and 1894 he traveled the country in person, and the essays he gathered into Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan spend as much time on the small and the local as on the grand. Alongside his visits to Kitzuki, the ancient shrine now known as Izumo Taisha, where he became the first Westerner ever admitted to the main sanctuary, he wrote chapters on Mionoseki, Hinomisaki and Yaegaki-jinja, minor shrines that never made it into any official register, and on the wayside stone figures of Jizo and the countryside's fox spirit lore.
That choice of subject was not an accident of itinerary. Hearn had concluded, and later chroniclers of his work still quote him for it, that Shinto "lived not in books but in Japanese people's hearts," that it was a folk spirit resting on custom and direct local experience rather than doctrine. He collected more than eighty protective amulets from shrines across the Izumo region over the course of his repeated visits, treating each small site as evidence in its own right rather than a footnote to the larger institution.
That is a fair description of what scholars now call Folk Shinto: the uncodified stratum of household rites, small unaffiliated shrines and local kami belief that sits outside both the shrine hierarchy and the organized Sect Shinto denominations, transmitted by custom rather than administration. Hearn was not a Shinto practitioner, and his account is a foreigner's sympathetic record rather than the tradition's own voice. But it is a record built from direct, patient, repeated encounter with exactly the material Folk Shinto names as its own, and it has stood as a starting point for outside readers ever since.