This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On December 15, 1945, the Allied occupation's General Headquarters issued Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Instruction Note 448, formally titled Abolition of Governmental Sponsorship, Support, Perpetuation, Control, and Dissemination of State Shinto. Four months after Japan's surrender, the order set out to dismantle a religious structure the Meiji government had spent seventy seven years building.
The directive's terms reached into every part of that structure. Shinto shrines were stripped of all public funding, public officials were barred from performing Shinto religious duties in any official capacity, and schools were prohibited from teaching the emperor's divine descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu or claims of Japanese racial superiority that the state Shinto system had woven into public education.
Every shrine that had operated as an arm of government administration under the Bureau of Shrines now had to reorganize as a voluntarily supported religious body, funded and run like any other private religious institution rather than as a department of state. The order ended, in a single instruction, a system that had stood since the Bureau's creation in 1900 and, in looser form, since the Meiji government's first moves against Shinto and Buddhism in 1868.
What the Shinto Directive changed for Shinto's spread was survival in an entirely different institutional form. Seventy seven years of standing as a tool of state ideology ended within months of Japan's surrender, and Shinto continued afterward as a voluntary religious tradition rather than as an arm of the Japanese government.