This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1868, the newly formed Meiji government issued the Kami and Buddhas Separation Order, forcibly dividing Shinto shrines from the Buddhist temples they had shared, often on the same grounds and under the same management, for centuries. The order broke apart a syncretic religious landscape that had grown up gradually over Japan's own history, in favor of a Shinto identity the new government could shape on its own.
The following year, 1869, the government re-established a Department of Divinity, building its authority around the emperor's claimed divine descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu. Shinto shrines, freed from their Buddhist entanglements the year before, were drawn directly into that project, becoming instruments of state ideology and national identity rather than sites people visited for private devotion.
That transformation deepened rather than stopping at 1869. The historian Sakamoto Koremaru dates the formal State Shinto system, as scholars use the specific term, to 1900, when the government created a dedicated Bureau of Shrines to administer Shinto affairs as a distinct arm of state, a structure that held until the system's end in 1945.
What the Meiji government's separation order and its aftermath changed for Shinto's spread was the creation of a state religion in the fullest sense, shrines administered by a government bureau, doctrine organized around imperial divinity, and public devotion reshaped into a tool of national ideology, a structure that stood for seventy seven years.