State Officials for Eighty Years, Then Private Clergy Overnight

From the Meiji government's reorganisation of Shinto in the 1870s until the end of the Second World War, most shrine priests were effectively civil servants of a state-sponsored religious system, State Shinto, in which shrine ranks, priestly appointments and standardised ritual were administered through government ministries as part of a program that fused shrine worship with national and imperial ideology, a status that gave the kannushi an official standing very different from that of clergy in a religion the state does not run.

The Allied Occupation's Shinto Directive of December 1945 ended that arrangement immediately and completely, ordering the total separation of religion from the Japanese state and stripping shrines of government funding and administrative status overnight; shrines across the country reorganised themselves within months into the Association of Shinto Shrines, a private religious corporation that has certified and organised the great majority of kannushi ever since. The kannushi today is therefore a very recent kind of religious professional, formally private and voluntary in a way the office was not for the eighty years before 1945, even though many individual shrine families and their hereditary connections to particular shrines long predate the state system that briefly absorbed them.