What the occupation called State Shinto was less a religion than an administrative arrangement built after 1868. Shrines were graded, funded and staffed through government offices, priests were treated as officials rather than clergy, and the whole system was declared to be not a religion at all but a civic observance owed by every subject regardless of what else they believed. That fiction allowed the state to require attendance from Buddhists and Christians while formally guaranteeing freedom of belief, and it made the emperor the living centre of a national rite.
The directive issued by the occupation authorities on 15 December 1945 dismantled the arrangement in a single stroke. It ordered the end of all official sponsorship, support, perpetuation, control and dissemination of Shinto, removed shrine affairs from government departments, banned the doctrines of imperial divinity and Japanese racial superiority from schools, and required that shrines be treated exactly as any other religious body. Shrines reorganized themselves within months as a private association, and the imperial house rites continued as the private observances of a family rather than acts of state.
Hirohito outlived that settlement by more than forty years and never publicly reopened it. One consequence surfaced only after his death: he had made no visit to Yasukuni Shrine since 1975, and a memorandum by a former grand steward published in 2006 was widely read as recording his displeasure at the 1978 enshrinement there of men convicted as war leaders. Historians differ on how much weight the note can carry, but no emperor has visited the shrine since.