"Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami" is the first attempt in any Western language (and possibly even in Japanese) to offer a critical examination of the Shinto tradition in its various aspects and guises. It constitutes a powerful critical and analytical tool to counter widely circulating textbooklike treatments of the subject.
Shinto is often presented as the indigenous religion of Japan, a cultural formation that supposedly has existed in an almost unchanged form from the remotest past as the unique expression of the Japanese polity and that is characterized, among other things, by a close relation with nature.
One of the aims of the book, as is clear from the subtitle, is precisely the dismantling of such stereotypical views. "Ways of the Kami" suggests a plurality of modes of interpretation of and interaction with sacred entities -- the kami -- a term that is itself to be understood in the plural. Far from being a simple and unified tradition, as is often assumed, Shinto is presented here as a complex and diverse entity.