Most jinja are “responsible” in some sense for a particular area, and the people who live in that area are known as the jinja’s “ujiko”, while the jinja is their “ujigami”. (The area is simply called the “ujiko area”.) I don’t know exact proportions, but my impression is that ujigami jinja form a large majority of jinja in Japan.
But this is Shinto, so there are, of course, exceptions. These are often called “sūkei jinja”, because people who have particular respect for a jinja that is not their ujigami jinja are called sūkeisha. The most famous example jinja that is a sūkei jinja is probably Meiji Jingū, in Tokyo, but there are others. The September 16th issue of Jinja Shinpō included a column written by the chief priest of one such jinja, Kanahebisui Jinja in Iwanuma, Miyagi Prefecture. (The homepage is in Japanese only at the time of writing.)
While the priests of ujigami jinja have responsibility for praying for the local community and supporting it in other ways, Revd Takahashi, the chief priest, says that the priests of sūkei jinja serve as intermediaries between the general public and the kami of their jinja. In one sense, there is less pressure on them, because they do not have responsibility for the local area. The other side of that is that they only get support from people who are committed to their jinja. Revd Takahashi writes that the importance and depth of this relationship really came home to him a decade ago, after the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Iwanuma is on the Pacific coast of Tōhoku, and was extremely badly hit. Kanahebisui Jinja, however, is in the inland part of the city, and built in the hills, on solid ground, so it escaped with relatively little damage. However, they did face a problem.
“Kanahebisui” means “Gold Snake Water”, and as a snake jinja, they traditionally renovated the sanctuaries in every year of the snake, on the Chinese zodiac. In order to pay for this, they solicited special donations from their adherents in the run-up to that year, and it seems that most of these donations came though kō, which are groups based in a particular area, all of whose members venerate the jinja. (There is a very long tradition of such groups.) Most of the kō were based in the areas affected by the disaster, because this is not a nationally famous jinja, and the year of the snake was 2013, just two years after the earthquake and tsunami.
The priests decided that they could not ask for donations from people who had probably suffered more in the disaster than they had, and so they did not start the fundraising.
In 2012, however, the inland kō, which had not suffered so much, approached the jinja and asked about making donations as usual. After discussion, the jinja decided that it would stand by the decision to not actively try to raise funds, but that it would accept donations that people offered spontaneously.
As a result, they were able to renew the jinja as normal in 2013.
That would have been moving enough by itself, but the jinja also received substantial donations from the leaders of the kō in Minamisōma, in Fukushima Prefecture, and Ōfunato, in Iwatë Prefecture, both of whom had lost their homes and some family members, and who had evacuated to other areas.
Revd Takahashi was deeply struck by the strength of these people’s commitment to the kami, and it motivated him to renew his commitment to serving as a priest, and researching the relationships between the Japanese and the kami.