Norinaga's argument had consequences he did not live to see. His claim that the Kojiki carried an authentic Japanese antiquity, uncontaminated by Chinese and Buddhist thought, was taken up in the nineteenth century by scholars and then by the state. Under State Shinto, the arrangement by which shrine practice was administered as a non-religious civic duty from the Meiji period to 1945, the descent of the imperial line from Amaterasu was taught in schools as historical fact, and the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki supplied the narrative. The mythical founding date of 660 BCE was made a national holiday. Textbooks presented the age of the gods as the opening chapter of Japanese history.
Scholars who questioned this paid for it. Tsuda Sokichi, who argued from the 1910s onward that the mythological sections were court compositions of the sixth and seventh centuries rather than records of events, saw his books banned and was prosecuted in 1940.
After 1945 the arrangement was dismantled. The occupation directives separated shrines from the state, the emperor publicly disclaimed divinity, and the mythic chronology left the curriculum. Tsuda's approach became the mainstream position. The Kojiki is now read as literature, as the foundational document of Japanese mythology, and as evidence for how an eighth-century court wanted its own origins understood. Shrines draw on its deities and its narratives, and it is quoted at festivals and in shrine literature, but no Shinto body treats it as revealed or binding in the way scripture functions elsewhere.