The Japanese archipelago is the home of Shinto, "the way of the kami," an indigenous religion so bound to the land that it has almost no significant presence anywhere else, a rarity among the world's major traditions. Shinto centres not on doctrine, scripture, or a founder but on the veneration of the kami: the innumerable sacred powers and presences that inhabit the natural world, mountains, waterfalls, ancient trees, striking rocks, the sun, as well as ancestral and mythic deities, chief among them the sun goddess Amaterasu, from whom the imperial line traditionally claimed descent. Its heart is ritual: purification, offering, and festival (matsuri) at shrines (jinja) that mark sacred sites, entered through the distinctive torii gate. For most of Japanese history Shinto coexisted and fused with Buddhism, imported in the sixth century, in an intricate combination (honji suijaku) in which kami and Buddhas were identified as aspects of one another, and most Japanese to this day participate in both, marking birth and marriage with Shinto rites and death with Buddhist ones.
The archipelago also produced the newer religion Tenrikyo and a host of other new religious movements. Japan thus represents a distinctive religious pattern: an indigenous, place-bound veneration of sacred nature and ancestry, layered with Buddhism, expressed far more through ritual practice and belonging than through creed.