Worship centered on public shrines

Shrine Shinto affirms worship centred on the public shrine (jinja), the dwelling-place of the kami, the gods, spirits, and sacred powers of Shinto. At the shrine, set apart by the torii gate and by rites of purification, priests offer prayers, food, and ceremony to the kami on behalf of the community, and worshippers visit to give thanks, make requests, and mark the festivals and seasons. This shrine-based worship, tied to particular places and their guardian deities, is the mainstream form of Shinto practised across Japan.

The great majority of Japan's shrines, estimated at around eighty thousand, are today affiliated with the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honcho), a private religious organisation founded in 1946 after the Allied occupation's Shinto Directive of December 1945 formally separated religion from the Japanese state and dismantled State Shinto.

The Association regards Ise Grand Shrine, dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu and periodically rebuilt every twenty years in a rite called shikinen sengu, as the spiritual centre of shrine Shinto, though the Association itself has no formal doctrinal authority over individual shrines, most of which retain considerable local autonomy in ritual practice and precedence.

Shrine Shinto is distinguished from Sect Shinto, the organised founder-led movements, and it embraces the great majority of ordinary Shinto practice, the local shrines with their festivals (matsuri), the great national shrines, and the rites that accompany birth, growth, and the turning of the year. Its focus on place, purification, and communal festival rather than on doctrine or founder reflects Shinto's character as a tradition of practice and reverence for the kami rooted in the land and its communities.

The formal privatisation of shrine Shinto after 1945 has not ended debate over its civic role: the Association of Shinto Shrines has been closely associated with the conservative advocacy organisation Nippon Kaigi, which lobbies for a more prominent public role for Shinto tradition and the imperial institution, and periodic visits by sitting prime ministers to shrines such as Yasukuni continue to raise constitutional questions in Japan about the separation of religion and state. Critics see such visits and advocacy as pressure to restore Shinto's prewar civic centrality by other means, while shrine Shinto's defenders describe the same activities as ordinary cultural and ancestral commemoration protected under Japan's postwar constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.