It is to be remembered, of course, that the Japanese word for gods, Kami, does not imply, any more than did the old Latin term, dii-manes, ideas like those which have become associated with the modern notion of divinity.
The Japanese term might be more closely rendered by some such expression as "the Superiors, " the Higher Ones";
and it was formerly applied to living rulers as well as to deities and ghosts. But it implies considerably more than the idea of a disembodied spirit; for, according to old Shinto teaching the dead became world-rulers.
They were the cause of all natural events, of winds, rains, and tides, of buddings and ripenings, of growth and decay, of everything desirable or dreadful. They formed a kind of subtler element, an ancestral aether, universally extending and unceasingly operating.
─Lafcadio Hearn《Japan: An Atteempt at interpretation》