>>3069
>A lot of Japanese supposedly follow(followed?) shintoism
What I was shown when seeing representations of different countries was that Japan looked like the intro to Incarnated as a Sword. (Minus the open air fields.) It's completely empty aside from a square platform inside a shinto temple and the walls and roof is filled with malevolent smiling faces with large mouths and sharp teeth. Anyone on the platform has to be "empty", meaning their energy is completely white, like air. If they gather even the slightest amount of any other energy they get eaten, because the yokais are all watching their every move waiting for them to fail so they can take them. Compared to other countries which had hell dimensions, Japan doesn't have one, yokais clear the area so well that it isn't needed. (The case with some people who were of Japanese race and were found in hell, may be because they were culturally western so they got moved outside and placed there.)

Being empty means to follow rituals with no meaning, just ritual behaviour. Individuality or even stopping to think isn't allowed, unless the thinking is "void" of meaning and concerns ritual practice or zen. Zen isn't treated as the same as buddhism because it's deleting all the laws and replacing them with "nothing" but it works in Japan.