Ujiko literally means child of the clan, and it originally meant the descendants of a lineage that worshipped a common ancestral kami, the ujigami. It long ago shifted to mean the households living within a shrine's parish area, and the two ideas remain tangled: your relationship is with the kami of your ground. There is no register of believers, no baptism, no profession and no exit procedure; the Association of Shinto Shrines estimates ujiko in the tens of millions on the basis of geography rather than declaration, which is why membership figures for Shinto are close to meaningless. In practice a household is enrolled by paying annual dues to the parish association, which is a lay body, and that association typically controls the shrine's finances, buildings and festival organisation, employing the priest rather than answering to him. Urban migration has broken the model badly: the parish system assumes people stay, and city shrines increasingly run on visitors and fee-paying rites instead of on enrolled households.