By reverently facing kami (deities) and hotoke (ancestors, Buddhist images), Japanese people embody and emplace important moral values. Meanwhile, they simultaneously use rituals for kami and hotoke to construct meaningful places in their lives.

The data for this study come from fourteen months of fieldwork in Kamakura city. Multiple research methods were employed, including observation of more than eighty rituals, participant observation, and informal and in-depth interviews concerning ritual life in Kamakura.

Kami and hotoke are the two major targets of ritual attention among the people of Kamakura. Places enshrining kami and hotoke generally evoke feelings with positive values and are refreshing to the participants. Feelings associated with places enshrining deities tend be more distant and formal than those associated with places enshrining ancestors.

During rituals for kami and hotoke, common bodily and spatial practices in Japanese social life manifest themselves. These practices, such as bowing, giving and receiving food and goods, and cleaning, embody and emplace important Japanese values, such as purity, reciprocity, and recognizing indebtedness to others.

Meanwhile, people in Kamakura creatively use rituals in the politics of place-making. Some ritual places connect Japanese people to meaningful places in their lives. For example, the kami and hotoke enshrined at domestic altars protect the house and the family, the kami of the neighborhood shrine protects the residents of the neighborhood, and the kami of the municipal shrine protects the residents of the city. Kami and hotoke can be deployed as symbols of the places that they protect, whether it is the house, the neighborhood, or the city. During these rituals, the boundaries and meanings of these places are contested and negotiated.

Not everybody participates in the rituals of place-making. For example, the locally self-employed take central roles in the neighborhood festival, while white-collar families are marginal in this process of place-making. Self-employed men and women assume complementary responsibilities in familial and communal rites.

In summary, rituals for kami and hotoke are simultaneously moral and political activities.