Also called Kiyome-jio, Morijio, Purification salt
In Japan salt (shio) is a common means of purification rooted in Shinto ideas of cleansing impurity: sprinkled after a funeral, heaped in small cones at doorways, and thrown by sumo wrestlers before a bout.
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Take care: Use plain salt only and keep it off plants, pets' paws and damaged skin. If you visit a shrine, follow the priests' rites as a respectful guest rather than performing them yourself.
Mourners leaving a funeral are often handed a small paper packet of salt to sprinkle on themselves before entering their home, since death is a source of kegare (impurity) in Shinto thought. Some Buddhist sects now discourage the custom, as Buddhism does not treat death as impure.
Uses: packet of salt
Before each bout, wrestlers throw a handful of salt across the clay ring to purify it. Sumo grew from shrine rituals, and the ring is treated as sacred ground.
Uses: salt
Before a rite, priests purify the participants and offerings with salt water called entō, shaking it from a sprig of sakaki. The Encyclopedia of Shinto traces the use of salt water for purification to an early ninth-century record of the Ise shrine.
Uses: salt water, sakaki branch
Restaurants and shops set small cones of salt by the entrance both to keep evil away and to draw in customers. A popular legend ties it to a Chinese emperor's cart-pulling animals, which stopped to lick salt at a consort's door.
Uses: salt, saucers
Shinto puts great weight on purity and on removing kegare, a state of ritual pollution that comes from death, illness, blood and wrongdoing. Purification, called harae, can be done with water (as in misogi), with a priest's wand, or with salt. The Kojiki, compiled in 712, tells how the god Izanagi bathed in the sea to cleanse himself after visiting the land of the dead, and sea water and salt have been linked to purity ever since.
Salt purification shows up across ordinary Japanese life. Kokugakuin University's Encyclopedia of Shinto describes priests using salt water before rites. Outside the shrine, salt is thrown in the sumo ring, sprinkled after funerals and heaped at shop doors. These customs are open to anyone and practised by people who would not call themselves religious. Many households keep a small dish of salt by the door for exactly this reason.
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