Article one presents kannagara as a personal and spiritual ideal, attunement rather than obedience, with little formal doctrine attached. For roughly seventy years spanning the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the Japanese state gave the same word a considerably harder political edge, and the reversal of that use afterward is part of the concept's real history.
State Shinto, the government-organised system that developed from the Meiji era and reached its most intense form during the militarist period before and during the Second World War, drew on kannagara and related language to frame the emperor as divinely descended and the nation itself as a manifestation of the kami's way, folding what article one presents as a quietist, nature-oriented ideal into an ideology of national destiny and wartime mobilisation, with shrine attendance and reverence for the emperor promoted as civic duty rather than left as the personal spiritual practice article one describes.
That use ended abruptly rather than fading gradually. The Shinto Directive, issued by the Allied occupation authorities in December 1945, ordered the government to withdraw all financial support from and disestablish State Shinto, and Emperor Hirohito's radio address the following January explicitly renounced the claim to divine status the wartime state had built partly on concepts like kannagara. Shrine Shinto has continued since as a voluntary religious practice rather than a state institution, and the postwar tradition's own writers have generally worked to recover kannagara's earlier, more personal and less nationalistic sense, an explicit act of doctrinal reclamation after the word had spent decades doing different, state-directed work.