Kamisama (gods) in Japan ? Do you believe in gods? It is said that there are more than 8,000 religions all over the world. What about in Japan? Many people must think about Buddhism (originally from India) and Shinto (originally from Japan) as religions in Japan. However most of Japanese people nowadays do not identify themselves as believers of a particular single religion. You can see a lot of religious events throughout a year in Japan such as Shogatsu (New year) during which they visit a Shinto shrine to wish for the happiness for the coming year, or Obon (in middle of August) during which they visit an Buddhist temple since it is believed that their ancestors' souls come back from the afterlife during that period. I myself, was born in a family of mild Shingon Buddhist (one of the Japanese mainstream Buddhism) but every member of my family go to a shrine at Shogatsu. To be honest, I don't know much about the both religions and my parents never told me and my sister about the religion. We were just taught to wish for the our health and the peace of people at a shrine and to say hello to our ancestors at a temple. So I don't consider myself as Shingon Buddhist nor Shintonist but it's not that I don't believe the existence of the god. I think the god exists in every little things around us. They don't save us or challenge us but just exist there. They might rather be kind of spirits. I think the world around us consists of the harmony of such a little gods. This concept is similar to the Shinto one. So I can say I was affected by Shinto ideas as well. This might seem to be strange for the people who have the strong belief to the particular religion. Recently I talked about this issue with a Muslim friend and she said she couldn't understand at all how this come to possible. We conclude the biggest difference between our ideas is the distance between the god and the daily life. Her God strongly affects her daily life and her principal about life while I normally don't think about them in my daily life. Sometimes the religion causes the conflict between the people. Recently we see quite a few sad news on TV or Internet about the conflicts between the people who have different religions. However given the variety of our great heritages from our different ancestors of different religions, I can't understand why such a conflict happens. The variety of the religions is our great heritage from the ancestors. We should not mix up it with the cause of the sad conflict.