What exactly is a kami in Shinto?

A kami is anything Shinto, Japan's traditional religion, venerates as sacred: deities, spirits, forces of nature, features of the landscape, and the spirits of honoured dead people. A mountain can be a kami, and so can thunder, a great tree, or a remarkable human being. In Shinto, kami are not outside nature looking in; they are part of it, with good and bad sides, like people.

That is why "god" is a slippery translation, and some Shinto scholars warn against it. Kami are not necessarily all-powerful or all-knowing. The scholar Motoori Norinaga offered a broad definition: anything with some eminent, out-of-the-ordinary quality that inspires awe. Japanese grammar adds to the fun, since nouns usually have no plural: kami can mean one or many. Tradition speaks of ya-o-yorozu no kami, literally "eight million kami", meaning countless.

The human angle is best told through a poet. Sugawara no Michizane was a brilliant scholar who was exiled by rivals and died in 903. Then, in 930, lightning and storms hit the capital and killed many of the rival Fujiwara clan. The court blamed his vengeful spirit, restored his titles and ordered him worshipped as Tenjin. Today Tenjin is the kami of learning, and students pray at his shrines before entrance exams.

With around 100,000 public shrines in Japan, kami are everywhere.