>>112519
>it is ultimately a japancentric religion and it doesn't make sense to practice it if you're not japanese
I think that this is both correct and mistaken in a way. I think that Shintou is simply the most original, universal kind of spirituality there is. It just took a different form in different parts of the earth. Shintou is the same spirituality that the Native Americans had, that the ancient pre-Christian Indo-European peoples had, that the Greeks and Romans had, and so on, whether you call it "Shintou," "paganism," "nature worship," "animism," or whatever else. I think that in that sense we can't authentically practice it in a Japanese mode outside of the Japanese landscape, but can practice forms of what is called "Shintou" wherever we are in the world as long as we are open to the voice of the earth.