Shinto studies examines Shinto ritual, shrine institutions and their history, particularly the Meiji era reorganisation of the tradition, establishing what a specific practice's documented history is and how state involvement has shaped it. The British diplomat and Japanologist William George Aston, already the translator of the eighth century chronicle Nihongi, published Shinto, the Way of the Gods in 1905, the first sustained scholarly study of Shinto in English, drawing on his philological training to set out its kami, rituals of purification and festival calendar as a documented religious system rather than a folkloric curiosity.
Shinto's institutional shape changed substantially under Meiji era state involvement, shrines ranked, rites standardized, a distinction drawn between state ceremony and sectarian religion, and Shinto studies is built to separate what is documented of the older practice from what the modern state administration reorganized or introduced. The atlas relies on Aston's founding method and the discipline it opened wherever a Shinto practice's antiquity or authenticity is claimed, checking the claim against the shrine and textual record rather than against the tradition's later, state shaped presentation of itself.