>>1297313First, you should fucking check yourself before you run your mouth about foreign cultures. If you're an Amerilard chances are your own life is very much "rigid" and lonesome and "lacks creative outlets" (unless you consider posting on 4chan "creative").
Second, you're right about Shinto fucking over Japanese culture, but probably not in the way you'd think.
What you and I call Shinto is an artificial state religion fabricated in the late 19th century. Japan's religion is and always was Buddhism. During the Meiji period Japan's modernizing government wanted to break away as much as possible from the old Edo period practices and its many Chinese influences. The goal was to create a new and distinctly Japanese nationalist culture.
As part of that program, state officials went around the country and observed the many local idiosyncratic practices of Japanese Buddhism not found in other forms of Buddhism. They aggregated them, picked the most unique and/or popular ones, tweaked some and called it all Shinto, which was supposedly a completely separate thing from Buddhism. Shinto temples were erected left and right, often in direct competition with older local Buddhist temples. Shinto priests were government employees, and being a shrine maiden was made a respectable item to put on a resume.
>Oh, you thought you were a good Buddhist? No, citizen! All those superstitious rituals and festivals you've been doing all your life were actually SHINTO. You're a good pureblood Japanese worshiping according to the good native Japanese religion, which just so happens to be centered around venerating the Emperor.This was mostly a fabrication, of course. There was never a strict dividing line between Buddhism, Japanese mythology and what would become Shinto. Religion is a very fluid and fuzzy thing, and syncretism is the rule, not the exception. But the separation between "foreign Buddhism" and "native Shinto" fitted the zeitgeist, and so it stuck, even to this day.
