For most of its history the Jingu title, used without further qualification, referred to exactly one place, the Grand Shrine of Ise, dedicated to the sun deity Amaterasu, regarded as the ancestral deity of the imperial line, which is precisely why the designation attached itself so firmly to this single shrine rather than spreading to others of comparable age. Ise's distinguishing practice, and the clearest demonstration of how seriously its imperial connection was taken, is the Shikinen Sengu, the periodic reconstruction of its main shrine buildings from fresh timber on an adjoining site, a rebuilding cycle traditionally begun under Empress Jito near the end of the seventh century and repeated roughly every twenty years ever since, so that the shrine is at once ancient in institution and physically new every generation.
The exclusivity of the Jingu title loosened only in the modern period, as new shrines with a direct imperial connection were founded and given the same designation, most visibly Meiji Jingu in Tokyo, built in 1920 to enshrine the deified Emperor Meiji, extending a title that had named a single shrine for over a thousand years to a shrine built in the twentieth century for a modern, individually named emperor.