In 1871 the government proclaimed a national ranking of shrines, from the imperial and national shrines at the top through prefectural and district grades down to the village shrine, and placed them all under state supervision. Registration made every shrine legible to the bureaucracy: its rank set its funding, its priests' standing, and its place in the ceremonial order. The system completed the separation's work, turning a landscape of local cults into a single administered hierarchy headed by Ise.
Tagged: Shinto State Shinto
The Event
- Date
- 1871 (exact)
- Era
- Meiji and State Shinto; Standard periodization of Shinto history
- Location
- Japan; today Japan
- Traditions
- Shinto
- Streams
- State Shinto
Connections
Primary Sources
- The shrine ranking proclamation of 1871.
Secondary Sources
- Hardacre, Helen. Shinto: A History. Oxford University Press, 2017.
- Breen, John, and Mark Teeuwen. A New History of Shinto. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Provenance: HIST-0912; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-28.
Related on This Site
History Event
Meiji Constitution
1889
History Event
Shinbutsu bunri
1868
History Event
Shinto Directive
1945
History Event
State Shinto
1868-1945
Language
Classical Japanese
The classical written language of Japan, in which the norito prayers and the early chronicles are composed.
Prayer or Creed
Norito
Formal ritual prayers in classical Japanese, recited by priests to the kami at shrine festivals and rites.
Technology
Nuclear power
The reactor judged apart from the bomb: prudence, waste, and descendants on one side of the ledger, decarbonization arithmetic on the other; and no magisterium with a binding word.
Tradition & Science
Shinto
A tradition without a creed for science to contradict: kami in the landscape, a shrine rebuilt on schedule for thirteen centuries as a living school of craft, and modern flashpoints in nuclear pollution and the definition of death.