TOC Totoro and Shinto I don t believe the section Totoro and Shinto is necessary Totoro has nothing to do with anything religious Even though there appears shrines and a tree with a shimenawa it doesn t mean that Totoro has shintoist themes because you can see shinto shrine everywhere in Japan Regarding appearance of shrine as Shintoism is just a misunderstanding by foreigners who have little knowledge of the Japanese way of religion Obake has nothing to do with shinto either No Japanese people regard obake as a part of shinto If you call Totoro religious almost all Japanese anime and manga will be religious Do you call Inuyasha religious just because Kagome lives in a shrine Or do you call Yu Yu Hakusho religious because Yusuke became a ghost and there re many yokais in the show Or do you say Shrek has Christian themes just because there s a church Calling something shintoism just because it is traditional is nonsense Even if Totoro seems to have shintoist themes to the westerners eyes it just means Totoro is a movie set in the Japanese countryside and it is nothing worthy of special mention You may believe most Japanese people are shintoist but it is not necessarily true They go to shrine on New Year s Day not because they believe in shinto but simply beacuse it is Japanese tradition The same thing can be said about the appearance of the shrine in Totoro The appearance of shinto shrine or that of obake can not be connected to shinto Believe it or not it is true that there s no Japanese word for shintoist although there is the word for Buddhist bukkyouto In other words Japanese people don t regard them something like shintoist To Japanese shinto is not something you believe in or you don t blieve in There s no bible or dogma Shinto is nothing like Christianity Islam or Buddhism It is even doubtful whether it is proper to say that shinto is a religion Totoro is nothing religious Repeat the appearance of the shrine doesn t mean Totoro has shintoist themes I must say that to see Totoro religious is only a biased viewpoint If there re no dissenting opinions I will erase the section Totoro and Shinto on the 24 of April a week after my first note on the issue True Totoro is not religious but there are significant Shinto themes throughout the film The Totoro are forest nature spirits the tree where they live is part of a shrine and so on Having Shinto themes does not mean Miyazaki was trying to get across some religious point Rather I imagine he was trying to evoke images of a lost past as it is set in the 1950s when things were simpler and trying to get people to remember their roots and not forget their traditions As you wrote yourself Shinto is not so much a religion anymore except to a very few but more of a set of traditions with some religious elements Totoro can have Shinto elements without being a religious film I don t think anyone is arguing the film is religious You re the only one who s said anything about that I do find it odd how you reply to yourself above and appear to be arguing with yourself Talk to Nihonjoe No I didn t talk to myself I wanted to say some more That s all Although I reverted the deletion of this section see following thread I have no familiarity with this topic and no opinion whether this section belongs in the article or not I agree with Michael Friedrich All the spiritual creatures appearing in Totoro totoro troll cat bus etc have as little resemblance to traditional Japanese shinto spirits as monsters from Nausica in contrast to those from Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away that have more expressly Japanese looks and names In either way unless the author of the section have reliable sources to back up his interpretation of this film in there it should be removed A couple of sentence that cite McCarthy s article may stay but the rest appears to be a product of original research Funnily enough the only reference to religion in Totoro that I ever heard well read seriously discussed is to