This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Most religious architecture treats age as a virtue: a temple or cathedral gains sanctity by surviving centuries in the same stones. Ise Grand Shrine, the most important site in Shinto and the home of the sun goddess Amaterasu, works the opposite way. Every twenty years its Inner and Outer Shrines are entirely rebuilt on an adjacent plot, in the same design, from freshly cut timber, and the kami are moved into the new buildings before the old ones are taken down. The shrine is never allowed to grow old.
The practice is called Shikinen Sengu, fixed year relocation, and it was instituted by Emperor Tenmu in 685 CE. He did not live to see it carried out; his successor Empress Jito performed the first cycle after his death, rebuilding the Inner Shrine in 690 and the Outer Shrine two years later. Every twenty years since, with only a handful of interruptions across thirteen centuries, most seriously during Japan's medieval Warring States period, the cycle has continued.
What actually happens spans nearly the whole twenty year interval. Roughly thirty separate rites lead up to the final relocation: cypress trees close to two hundred years old are felled in their own night ceremony and carried to the shrine, joined by carpenters using traditional methods with no nails, and the shrine's sacred treasures and vestments are remade entirely rather than restored. Nothing old is kept. The current cycle began in 2025 and will conclude with the main relocation in 2033.
Shinto priests describe the principle behind this as tokowaka, forever young: the shrine keeps its vitality not by resisting time but by rebuilding faster than time can wear it down. Architectural historian Cassandra Adams, writing in the Journal of Architectural Education, reads the practice as a genuine alternative to the usual logic of heritage preservation, continuity achieved through prescribed destruction and renewal rather than through keeping the original material intact. The building is temporary. The pattern, repeated on schedule for over a thousand years, is what endures.