Primitive Shinto is one of the loveliest religions in the world. It's beautiful in its simplicity — defenseless too, as it proved, against the nativists and nationalists who warped it into 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century xenophobia.
Rudimentary, vague, undefined, undefinable, Shinto for centuries didn't even have a name. It didn't need one; there was nothing to distinguish it from, nothing it was not. One good sentence can say everything there is to say about it — this one, for example, by historian Takeshi Matsumae: "In some rural areas even today (1993), elderly villagers face the rising sun each morning, clap their hands together, and hail the appearance of the sun over the peaks of the nearby mountain as 'the coming of the kami.'"
That's Shinto — the way ("to") of the kami ("shin"). As to the kami — who might they be? "Gods," we say in English, the language offering nothing better, but it's too freighted a word, too suggestive of power rather than innocence, of something specific as opposed to anything, one knows not what.
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