The next section shows that kami are actually very different from the Western concept of God. This caused a great deal of confusion even among Japanese: the Shinto theologian Ueda Kenji estimated in 1990 that nearly 65% of entering students now associate the Japanese term kami with some version of the Western concept of a supreme being. The idea that kami are the same as God stems in part from the use of the word kami to translate the word 'God' in some 19th century translations of the Bible into Japanese. Not all kami are good - some are thoroughly evil. Kami have a specific life-giving, harmonising power, called musubi, and a truthful will, called makoto (also translated as sincerity). It is in everything and is found everywhere, and is what makes an object itself rather than something else. Kami as a property is the sacred or mystical element in almost anything. So the word is used to refer to both the essence of existence or beingness which is found in everything, and to particular things which display the essence of existence in an awe-inspiring way.īut while everything contains kami, only those things which show their kami-nature in a particularly striking way are referred to as kami.
Kami can refer to beings or to a quality which beings possess. Shinto belief includes several ideas of kami: while these are closely related, they are not completely interchangeable and reflect not only different ideas but different interpretations of the same idea. Shinto tradition says that there are eight million million kami in Japan. They can influence the course of natural forces, and human events. Kami are close to human beings and respond to human prayers. The best English translation of kami is 'spirits', but this is an over-simplification of a complex concept - kami can be elements of the landscape or forces of nature. Kami can be elements of the landscape or forces of nature.
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