![]() Instead, they inhabit sacred places, natural phenomena, or people during rituals that ask for their blessing. Kami are not visible to the human realm.Traditionally, kami possess two souls, one gentle ( nigi-mitama) and the other assertive ( ara-mitama) additionally, in Yamakage Shinto (see Ko-Shintō), kami have two additional souls that are hidden: one happy ( saki-mitama) and one mysterious ( kushi-mitama). Kami must be appeased in order to gain their favor and avoid their wrath. They can nurture and love when respected, or they can cause destruction and disharmony when disregarded. In the ancient traditions there were five defining characteristics of kami: The Kojiki also includes descriptions of various kami. While Shinto has no founder, no overarching doctrine, and no religious texts, the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), written in 712 CE, and the Nihon Shoki(Chronicles of Japan), written in 720 CE, contain the earliest record of Japanese creation myths. The reduplicated term generally used to refer to multiple kami is kamigami. When a singular concept is needed, -kami ( 神) is used as a suffix. In his Kojiki-den, Motoori Norinaga gave a definition of kami: ".any being whatsoever which possesses some eminent quality out of the ordinary, and is awe-inspiring, is called kami." īecause Japanese does not normally distinguish grammatical number in nouns (the singular and plural forms of nouns in Japanese are the same), it is sometimes unclear whether kami refers to a single or multiple entities.The matter of the words' origins is still a subject of debate but it is generally suggested that the word kami was derived from Ainu word kamuy. In the Ainu language, the word kamuy refers to an animistic concept very similar to Japanese kami. ![]() It is written with the kanji 神, Sino-Japanese reading shin or jin.
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