The Shrine That Has Been Rebuilt 62 Times

Ise Jingu, the most sacred Shinto shrine complex, sits in Mie Prefecture on the Pacific coast of Japan. Every twenty years its two main shrines, the Naiku and the Geku, are dismantled and rebuilt on adjacent plots, identical in plan and material to the structures they replace. The ritual is called Shikinen Sengu, and tradition dates its first performance to 690 CE under Empress Jito.

The rebuild is itself a long ceremony. Preparations begin about eight years before the official move. Roughly 13,000 logs of hinoki cypress are harvested from designated sacred forests and floated down rivers to Ise. They are aged, milled, and worked using mortise-and-tenon joinery without nails. Apprentice carpenters spend a full Sengu cycle learning the techniques from masters who learned them at the previous rebuild, which is part of the point — the practice keeps the eighth-century construction skills alive in working hands rather than in books.

The 62nd Sengu was completed in October 2013. Around 1.5 million people visited the shrines that year. The 63rd is scheduled for 2033.

The rite has been interrupted only twice, both during the late medieval Sengoku wars when the shrine briefly went unrebuilt for 120 years until Toyotomi Hideyoshi's reunification financed its restart in 1585. The continuity since then has made Ise an unusual case study: a structure that is, by Western preservation standards, never older than twenty years, and yet by Japanese reckoning has stood unchanged for fourteen centuries.