shintô practices today are not those your grandfather knew, or rather not entirely — assuming your grandfather practiced shintô.

Despite the many popular narratives, shintô is NOT ahistorical. It has not existed unchanged since the very earliest days of the Japanese people. For that matter, just who constitutes the Japanese people has changed multiple times throughout the history of Japan.

As the various peoples of Japan came into contact with other cultures, they adopted and adapted ideas and rituals from those cultures.

Like most folk "religions", shintô is accretive; that is it evolves over time — new ideas are added, older ideas are modified, and sometimes discarded as they are no longer relevant.

Add to this the fact that folk religions are intensely local in their expression and exist in multiple variations, even within a single cultural group. So just which ideas and rituals were adopted and adapted also varied from location to location.

Recently, another factor is the ready access to new cultures and their ideas through the internet. The result is a shintô, or more accurately shintô(s), that has continuously changed, and even now is in the process of changing.

And should you pass those practices on to your children, expect that once again those practices will change, as those children adjust to the changing world they live in.