Ise poses the sharpest version of a question this atlas raises repeatedly: what makes a place the same place. It answers it in a way that almost nothing else does.
The Shikinen Sengu
Every twenty years, the shrines at Ise are built again.
New buildings are raised from new timber on an adjacent site, kept vacant for the purpose. The kami is transferred to them at night. The old buildings are then dismantled, and their materials distributed to shrines across Japan, where they are reused.
Twenty years later the process reverses, back onto the first plot. The two sites alternate indefinitely.
The most recent was the sixty-second, completed in 2013. The next falls in 2033.
How it is done
Preparation runs for about seventeen years, so work on the next rebuilding begins within a few years of the last one finishing.
- Hand tools only. No power tools are used on the sanctuary buildings.
- Around ten thousand cypress are felled, from forests the shrine has been replanting since the 1920s against future rebuildings.
- The timber is not nailed; the buildings are joined.
- Not only the buildings are remade but the bridges, the fences, and over a thousand sacred objects and garments, each reproduced by the relevant craft to the same specification.
- The cost of the 2013 cycle was on the order of fifty-seven billion yen, met by donation.
The practice is documented from the late seventh century, traditionally instituted under Empress Jito around 690.
The problem it raises
No timber at Ise is older than twenty years. The ground alternates between two plots. Nothing physical persists at all.
By the ordinary criteria of heritage conservation (original fabric, material authenticity, minimal intervention), Ise should not count as an ancient building. It is, on those terms, a modern structure on a site with a long history.
And yet the continuity claimed at Ise is stronger, not weaker, than that of buildings which have merely stood.
What is actually conserved
The answer the practice gives is that what continues is not the material but the act of building, and the knowledge of how.
A carpentry technique survives only by being performed. Twenty years is roughly the interval at which a craftsman can learn as an apprentice, work as a journeyman, and then teach, so the cycle is calibrated to the transmission of a skill across working lifetimes.
A building left alone decays and takes its techniques with it. A building remade on schedule cannot lose them.
This is a genuinely different theory of preservation from the one the rest of the world's heritage regime is built on, and it caused real difficulty when international conservation doctrine met it. The Nara Document on Authenticity of 1994 was drafted substantially in response, broadening "authenticity" to admit traditions where the form and the practice, rather than the substance, are what persist.
What can be seen
Almost nothing.
The complex is about a hundred and twenty-five shrines around two centres four kilometres apart, the Naiku, holding Amaterasu, and the Geku, holding Toyouke, kami of food.
The public reaches the outer fences and sees the ridge of a roof over a wooden palisade. The interiors are open to the priesthood and the imperial family alone. Photography is prohibited beyond set points.
The chief priestess must be a member of the imperial house.
Around nine million people a year come to see very little, which is the arrangement rather than a failure of it.
The architecture is plain unpainted cypress with thatched roofs, in a style owing nothing to Chinese models, which is to say it preserves, by rebuilding, a form that predates Buddhist influence in Japan.