Jinja

The jinja is the Shinto shrine, the dwelling of a kami and the ordinary place of its worship, and it is the general term of which the grander shrine titles are particular ranks.

A dwelling, not an assembly hall

A jinja enshrines one or more kami, whose presence is focused in the hidden object, the shintai, kept in the inmost sanctuary; the ordinary worshipper approaches only the outer hall of worship, passes beneath the torii gate that marks the boundary of sacred ground, purifies the hands and mouth at the water basin, and makes an offering with a bow and a clap. The shrine is not primarily a place of congregation and preaching, since Shinto has little doctrine to teach, but a place where the kami is present and can be approached with purity and offering.

From the local to the national

Japan holds tens of thousands of jinja, ranging from great institutions with a professional priesthood to small roadside shrines with none, and most are affiliated to the Association of Shinto Shrines, which certifies their priests and coordinates their observances. The word jinja is the base term, while jingu and taisha are higher designations reserved for shrines of particular rank or antiquity. The density of shrines across the landscape, many marking a mountain, a wood or a rock held to be the seat of a kami, is one of the most visible features of the Japanese religious environment.

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.