The kamidana, literally a god-shelf, is the miniature household shrine kept in a Japanese home for the daily worship of the kami, bringing the practice of the shrine into the dwelling.
The shrine in the house
Placed high on a wall in a clean and respected part of the home, above head height and facing a favourable direction, the kamidana is a small shrine, often modelled on the form of a shrine building, in which are enshrined the ofuda, the talismans of the deities honoured by the household, commonly including the ofuda of the Grand Shrine of Ise and of the local tutelary shrine. Before it are set simple daily offerings, rice, water, salt and sometimes sake and a sprig of sakaki, and the household greets the kami with a bow and a clap, so the shelf brings the daily approach to the kami into the ordinary life of the family.
Placement and purity
The kamidana is kept high and clean because the kami are honoured by elevation and purity, and its placement follows rules of respect, set above the level of the head and not beneath a passageway of the floor above. Many homes keep both a kamidana for the kami and a separate Buddhist altar, the butsudan, for the ancestors and the buddhas, the two coexisting in the same house in the ordinary Japanese pattern of honouring both traditions. The god-shelf thus makes the home a place of daily Shinto devotion, a domestic counterpart to the shrine, where the household maintains its own small relationship with the kami it enshrines.