The Ise Grand Shrine

Rebuilt every 20 years around a mirror nobody may see

Ise Jingū is a complex of 125 shrines centred on two. The Inner Shrine, Naikū, is where the sun goddess Amaterasu is believed to dwell; the Outer Shrine, Gekū, about six kilometres away, belongs to Toyouke-hime, goddess of agriculture and the rice harvest. Naikū is said to hold the sacred mirror Yata no Kagami, and it is Shinto's holiest site. The public may walk the forest and the paths laid out in the Meiji period, but no further than sight of the thatched roofs behind four tall wooden fences.

The Nihon Shoki tells how Princess Yamatohime, daughter of Emperor Suinin, set out from Mount Miwa to find Amaterasu a permanent home and wandered for twenty years before reaching Ise, where she heard the goddess call it a secluded and pleasant land she wished to live in. At Uji-tachi the princess set up fifty bells to mark the ground, and the river is still the Isuzu, the fifty bells. Tradition dates the founding to 4 BC; other dates put forward are the third century for Naikū and the fifth for Gekū.

Every twenty years both main shrines, and the 100-metre wooden Uji Bridge over the Isuzu, are rebuilt on the plot next door to the same dimensions, in solid Japanese cypress with no nails, in a style reserved for Ise alone that echoes early rice granaries. The sanctuary's apparel, furnishings and treasures are remade too, and the priests carry the Holy Mirror across. The cycle, the Shikinen Sengū, takes about 30 rituals over some eight years, starting with the ritual felling of the first trees. Its original physical purpose is unknown. Shinto belief calls it tokowaka, renewal that keeps the sacred in pursuit of eternity, and it hands the old building skills from one generation to the next. The first was held under Empress Jitō at the end of the seventh century. The sixty-second, in 2013, cost 57 billion yen, raised entirely from private donations, and the next is due in 2033.

The chief priest or priestess must be related to the imperial family. From the late seventh century to the fourteenth a princess, the Saiō, served here, and since 2017 the supreme priestess has been Sayako Kuroda, daughter of the retired Emperor Akihito. Pilgrims came in floods. In the Edo period an estimated one Japanese person in ten made the journey, and records count 3.62 million visitors in 50 days in 1625.