Included with care: the word does not map cleanly.
Kami are not entities in the ufological sense, and the word means neither spirit nor god. A kami can be a mountain, a river, an ancestor or an abstract force, and the relationship is one of ritual and reciprocity within a living religion. Listed here only because some kami occupy the position of a spirit of place.
Sharing the world with us, ordinarily imperceptible, able to become briefly visible. The oldest and largest branch.
Degree of embodiment: 2 to 3, energetic or subtle to comes and goes
Scale, 1 to 5
5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.
R: living religion
Source code
An element of a religion currently practised by large numbers of people, not a folklore curiosity, and handled here accordingly.
Element of a living religion
Tradition-side
Held by very large numbers of people as religious truth rather than folklore. The appropriate approach is the tradition's own, through its own scholars and practitioners, not entity-collecting.
Protocol exists
Tradition-side
The tradition carries specific rules for approach: things not to accept, say, take or give. Long lists of do-nots usually mean a long history of people treating the encounter as consequential, whatever was actually being encountered.
Deliberate contact work
Read this first
The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.
Who should be careful
Practice-side
Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.