Purity and Pollution Govern Approach to the Kami

Shinto organizes access to the kami around a state called kegare, ritual impurity or defilement, and its opposite, the cleanness that purification restores. Kegare is deliberately not a moral category: contact with death, childbirth, disease, menstrual blood or other bodily conditions can all bring it on, none of them involving any wrongdoing by the person affected, and Shinto teaching is explicit that the state passes no judgment on anyone who carries it. What kegare does is bar approach to the kami until it lifts, since the shrine space and the ritual encounter with the kami require a state Shinto calls kiyome, purity, that impurity temporarily suspends rather than permanently forfeits. Two rites restore it. Misogi is purification by water, traditionally standing beneath a waterfall or submerging fully in a river or the sea, echoing the mythic account of the god Izanagi purifying himself in a river after returning from the land of the dead. Harae is the broader term for ritual purification generally, covering everything from a priest's simple prayer and a wand waved over worshippers to salt scattered at a doorway to a mass purification performed for an entire community, and either misogi or harae can lift the state kegare represents and restore a person's standing to approach the kami again.

The purity kegare threatens is temporary and recoverable by design, which is part of what separates Shinto's framework from moral guilt in other religious traditions: nobody carries kegare permanently, and nobody is excluded from Shinto practice for having incurred it, only asked to wait and be purified before approaching the kami again. In ordinary shrine practice today this shows up in small, routine forms rather than dramatic ritual: worshippers rinse their hands and mouth at a water basin called a temizuya before entering shrine grounds at all, a miniature harae performed by every visitor regardless of why they have come. Larger scale purification became a matter of state policy for a period of Japanese history: during the Meiji era, and again more forcefully under State Shinto in the decades before 1945, the government standardized and promoted purification rites nationally as part of establishing Shinto as a unifying civic practice, a use of the tradition the postwar Shinto Directive of 1946 formally ended by separating Shinto from state sponsorship. Traditional taboo periods surrounding childbirth and death, historically requiring a set number of days of separation from shrine visits and sometimes from the wider community, have loosened considerably in contemporary practice, though the underlying logic, that these are conditions to be purified through rather than permanent marks against a person, remains the same one recorded in Shinto's earliest sources.