A State Ranking System, Built and Then Dismantled

For most of Shinto's history a jinja was simply a local shrine, its standing decided by regional reputation and imperial or noble patronage rather than by any single national system. That changed sharply after the Meiji Restoration in the late nineteenth century, when the government built Shinto into an instrument of state ideology and imposed a formal national ranking of shrines, sorting jinja into imperial, national and prefectural grades with the associated jingu and taisha titles set near the top of that new hierarchy, all administered by the state rather than by the shrines themselves. This arrangement, later called State Shinto, lasted until Japan's defeat in the Second World War, when the occupying authorities issued the Shinto Directive of 1946, formally separating the state from Shinto and abolishing the government ranking system outright.

Shrines that had operated for decades inside a state administered hierarchy had to reorganise themselves voluntarily, and the great majority joined a new private umbrella body, the Association of Shinto Shrines, which continues to coordinate shrine affairs, priestly training and ritual standards without any government authority behind it, leaving the word jinja to describe a shrine's basic religious character rather than its rank in a system that no longer officially exists.