Amaterasu is bound to the Japanese imperial house. The traditional accounts hold that she sent her grandson Ninigi down to rule the islands, giving him three sacred treasures, the mirror, the sword and the jewel, that became the imperial regalia, and that the emperors descend from him and so from her. The mirror drawn from the cave is identified with the Yata-no-Kagami kept, by tradition, at her greatest shrine.
That shrine is Ise Jingu, the most sacred site of Shinto, where Amaterasu is enshrined in the Inner Shrine (Naiku). In a practice attested for many centuries, the shrine buildings are ritually rebuilt on an adjacent site every twenty years, the shikinen sengu, so that the sanctuary is at once immensely old and perpetually new, embodying a Shinto sense of renewal rather than preservation.
This mythology became politics. From the Meiji era into the Second World War, State Shinto made the emperor's divine descent from Amaterasu a doctrine of the state. After Japan's defeat, the Allied occupation's Shinto Directive of December 1945 separated Shinto from the state, and on 1 January 1946 Emperor Hirohito publicly disavowed the idea that he was a living god descended from Amaterasu. Shinto continues today as a living religion; that specific political claim does not.