A State Rite Turned Private Household Matter

Niiname-sai's place in the imperial calendar was fixed in enormous procedural detail by early codes of court law and ritual, most fully preserved in the tenth century compilation known as the Engishiki, which sets out the offerings, timing, and precise conduct expected of the rite as part of an entire state administered ritual calendar in which the emperor's offerings to the kami were treated as acts of the state itself rather than as the private religious observance of one family. That status changed abruptly after the Second World War: the occupation era Shinto Directive of 1945 formally separated Shinto from the machinery of the state, ending State Shinto as an officially sponsored institution and reclassifying the imperial family's rites, Niiname-sai among them, as private religious activity performed by the emperor as an individual rather than as acts of the Japanese state, even though the ceremony itself continued with little outward change.

Shrines across the country continue to hold their own local harvest thanksgiving rites on or near the same date, observances that were never dependent on the imperial court's participation and continued without interruption through the postwar reclassification, so the disruption affected the rite's legal and political status far more than its actual practice at the shrine level nationwide.