"Occult Japan" is a wonderful collection of lore compiled from the Shinto path, dating to an important era in which the nation of Japan was rapidly changing; the Meiji period which had begun several decades before was erasing traditional technology even as it changed cultural and behavioral norms- this work then is both about the traditional spiritual system and the effects of then-modern reform on the same. It is as much a work about culture in the secular as the religious sense.It ought to be noted that some trappings of ethnocentrism were applied in the study here.