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 February 2, 1946, three existing Shinto organizations joined together to form the Association of Shinto Shrines, known in Japan as Jinja Honcho, established as a nongovernmental religious corporation rather than an arm of the state. The new association organized itself directly in response to the Allied occupation's Shinto Directive of December 1945, which had disestablished State Shinto and stripped Japan's shrines of the government support they had relied on for decades.
The association did not simply replace what the occupation had removed; it took on the functions the former government Institute of Divinities had performed, giving Japan's Shinto shrines an independent legal and administrative footing they had never held before, since state support had always come with state control attached.
That independence proved durable. The Association of Shinto Shrines has continued as the shrines' central coordinating body ever since its 1946 founding, outlasting the occupation that had forced the reorganization in the first place and continuing to operate on the private, nongovernmental footing it adopted at the start.
What the 1946 founding changed for Shinto's spread was survival as a living religious practice once state backing disappeared. Today the association counts roughly eighty thousand affiliated shrines, a network built not on government support, which the occupation had just eliminated, but on the independent organization Shinto's own institutions built for themselves in its place.