For most of Japanese history Ame-no-Minakanushi existed only on the page, the first name in the Kojiki's cosmogony but the object of essentially no shrine cult, a philosophical starting point rather than a god anyone prayed to directly. That changed, in a limited but visible way, through the Suitengu shrines, a network with its head shrine in Kurume and a well known branch in Tokyo, which enshrine Amenominakanushi alongside other figures including the child emperor Antoku, and which are visited today chiefly by expectant parents seeking blessing for safe childbirth and the wellbeing of small children, a devotional purpose with no clear connection to his original role as the still, ordering center of the cosmos. This popular association arose through syncretism with Suiten, a water deity of Buddhist origin whose name is written with characters meaning water heaven and who was identified with the native kami during the long period when Buddhist and Shinto worship were closely intertwined; the modern Suitengu shrines descend directly from that combined cult, even after the Meiji era's formal separation of the two religions.
Ame-no-Minakanushi's late elevation by Kokugaku scholars and by new religious movements, several of which placed him at the center of newly systematized creation theologies, ran on a largely separate, more intellectual track from this popular shrine devotion, so that the same deity has, in effect, two distinct modern profiles: a scholarly one, reasoned toward by theologians, and a popular one, quietly petitioned by mothers and infants at Suitengu.