Shake

Izumo Taisha's hereditary priesthood illustrates how a shake family could respond to state pressure by building an alternative rather than simply persisting inside the state system. During the Meiji period, when the government organised Shinto shrines into the ranked state system and increasingly treated shrine ritual as civic duty rather than religion, a category of independently organised bodies known as sect Shinto, kyoha shinto, was permitted to register separately as religious organisations in their own right, outside the state shrine hierarchy.

The Senge family, hereditary head priests of Izumo Taisha, used this opening to found Izumo Oyashirokyo, later called Izumo Taishakyo, an organised religious body built around devotion to the shrine's deity Okuninushi, giving the family a role as founders and leaders of a registered religion alongside their older role as shrine priests. This dual position meant the Senge family's authority did not depend only on hereditary headship of a single shrine the way shake families elsewhere often did; when the postwar Shinto Directive stripped shrines of state support and status, Izumo Taisha's priesthood already had an independent religious organisation to fall back on, distinct from Jinja Honcho, which most other shrines joined instead. The family's line at Izumo also has an older internal division of its own, tracing to a medieval succession dispute between kin that produced the related Kitajima priestly line, a reminder that hereditary succession within a shake family has its own history of contest, not simply an unbroken transfer of a single office from father to son.