Jinja Honcho was established in February 1946, weeks after the occupation's Shinto Directive dissolved State Shinto and cut the shrines off from public funding, as a private religious corporation to hold them together. Around eighty thousand shrines affiliate, and it certifies priests, issues the Ise talismans distributed nationally, and sets ritual standards. It is also political: its affiliated lobby, Shinto Seiji Renmei, campaigns for constitutional revision, for official status for Yasukuni, and for imperial ritual, and overlaps substantially with the conservative wing of Japanese politics — a set of connections that received sustained press attention through the 2010s. That politics, together with disputes over money and over the appointment of chief priests, has driven defections: Nikko Toshogu left in 2019, Meiji Jingu withdrew and later returned, and Fushimi Inari Taisha, Yasukuni and several others were never members. So the single national body is neither as unified nor as representative as its size suggests, and a meaningful number of the most-visited shrines in Japan sit outside it.