This accessible guide to the development of Japan’s indigenous religion from ancient times to the present day offers an illuminating introduction to the myths, sites and rituals of kami worship, and their role in Shinto’s enduring religious identity.

• Offers a unique new approach to Shinto history that combines critical analysis with original research
• Examines key evolutionary moments in the long history of Shinto, including the Meiji Revolution of 1868, and provides the first critical history  in English or Japanese of the Hie shrine, one of the most important in all Japan
• Traces the development of various shrines, myths, and rituals through history as uniquely diverse phenomena, exploring how and when they merged into the modern notion of Shinto that exists in Japan today
• Challenges the historic stereotype of Shinto as the unchanging, all-defining core of Japanese culture

John Breen is Reader in Japanese at SOAS (University of London) and Associate Professor at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, where he edits   the journal Japan Review. His publications include Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (edited, 2008), Inoue Nobutaka, Shintō: A Short History (translated and adapted with Mark Teeuwen, 2002), Shintō in History: Ways of the Kami (edited with Mark Teeuwen, 2000), and Japan and Christianity: Impacts and Responses, (edited with Mark Williams, 1996).

Mark Teeuwen is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Oslo. As well as the books authored and edited with John Breen, he is co-editor of Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm (with Fabio Rambelli, 2003) and The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion (with Bernhard Scheid, 2006).