Ise Jingū

Ise is not visited like a monument: the main buildings stay hidden behind four fences, and visitors stop at the third. The inner shrine, the Naikū, houses the sacred mirror, one of the three imperial regalia. Every twenty years carpenters and smiths remake sixty-five buildings identically, along with the bridges and some sixteen hundred ritual objects, nail-free and in hinoki cypress, then dismantle the old ones. The process hands the craft from one generation to the next and makes the building’s age irrelevant.