State Shinto's formal institutional structure ended abruptly with the Allied occupation of Japan after the Second World War: the Shinto Directive, issued by General Headquarters in December 1945, ordered the complete separation of religion from the state, abolished the government bureau administering shrine Shinto as civic ceremony, and ended state financial support for shrines, followed in January 1946 by Emperor Hirohito's Ningen-sengen, commonly called the Humanity Declaration, in which the emperor renounced the claim to being a living deity, akitsumikami, that State Shinto ideology had attributed to the imperial office.
Historians of modern Japan caution against treating State Shinto as a single, perfectly uniform system evenly imposed across the whole country and its roughly eighty years of operation, noting substantial regional variation in enforcement and continuing scholarly debate over exactly how much genuine popular religious belief State Shinto commanded as against the outward, sometimes reluctant, civic compliance the system also demanded and, through legal pressure, could compel. State Shinto is treated in this atlas as a specific and now ended historical formation of the Meiji through wartime period, distinct from shrine Shinto and folk Shinto practice, which continued in various forms both before and after State Shinto's construction and dissolution.