>>49273361
I would say regional differences and quirks still very much persist based on what I've read. But yeah, certainly there was, perhaps still is, this kind of drive towards centralization. There's apparently some kind of a Shinto revival going on in Japan currently. Part of it is pretty shallow - a boom in goshuin collecting because they are nice to post on social media, but there's apparently been a spillover effect of people getting more interested in it for real. But neither the people nor institutions really know what to do with this. Part of this is also that a lot of Japanese people don't really know what to do or how to behave in shrines either. While Jinja Honcho does not really proselytize, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of new drive towards centralization via trying to propagate some kind of concencus about how to behave in shrines and what Shinto should be and offer to people.

But yeah. The Suwa lore is crazy deep and the more you look into it and the area the more bizarre how the Suwa are is like some kind of microcosm for Touhou. They got everything. The Yatsugatake mountains with their Tengu Peak is a stone's throw away. They have a shrine called Hokuto Jinja or Big Dipper Shrine bestled between two of the Suwa Taisha shrines. They got a weird flying boat sculpture. They even found one of those keyhole shaped kofun burial mounds nearby after the release of Wily Beast.

I also recently watched Kimi no Na Wa and the town in it is apparently based on Suwa. It was pretty remarkable how the plot was basicaly local kami arranges an incredibly convoluted body swap time travel plot to save the town.