The smallest part of the shrine entrance, kept: rinse the left hand, the right hand, the mouth, and bow at the threshold. Derived from misogi and not misogi. No cold water here; that lives in Health.
At the threshold
1Rinse the left hand
2Rinse the right hand
3Rinse the mouth
4Bow at the threshold
Water from any tap. The bow is a bow, not a performance. For cold water, which has its own risks and its own page, see Health: Cold.
The doorway bow
The portable version: one small bow at every doorway you pass through today. Tap each time, or once for the day.
The record
The honest limit, stated first. Shinto as a single indigenous religion with a continuous history is substantially a nineteenth-century construction, and the argument was made from inside Japanese scholarship, by Kuroda Toshio in 1981, not imposed from outside. What was separated from Buddhism in 1868 had been fused with it for a thousand years, and the state religion built on the separation then made shrine attendance compulsory and sent people to die. The tradition holds that the kami are the point of the washing and the bow, and that a version without them is not the practice; that is its position and it is printed here rather than argued with. Cold water immersion, the part of purification most often sold, causes cardiac events and drownings and is not on this page. What survives clean is the smallest part: hands, mouth, threshold, bow.