ISE, Japan (AP) — Deep in the forests of the Japanese Alps, Shinto priests keep watch as woodsmen dressed in ceremonial white chop their axes into two ancient cypress trees, timing their swings so that they strike from three directions.
An hour later, the head woodcutter shouts, “A tree is falling!” as one of the 300-year-old trees crashes down, the forest echoing with a deep crack. A moment after, the other cypress topples over.
The ritualistic harvesting of this sacred timber is part of a remarkable process that has happened every two decades for the last 1,300 years at Ise Jingu, Japan’s most revered Shinto shrine.
Each generation, the Ise complex is knocked down and rebuilt from scratch, a massive, $390 million demolition and construction job that takes about nine years. It requires the country’s finest carpenters, woodcutters, builders and artisans to pour their hearts into the smallest details of structures that are doomed from the moment the work begins.
The buildings at Ise will only stand for about a decade before the project starts all over again, but as the priests consecrate the construction, the workers shout: “A building for a thousand years! Ten thousand years! A million years and forever!”
Those close to the shrine often recognize a deep poignancy about the way the never-ending rebuilding intertwines with their lives.
“Twenty years from now, the older generation — our grandfathers — will likely no longer be here. And those of us who are still young now will then see our grandchildren involved in the next” version of Ise, said Yosuke Kawanishi, a Shinto priest whose family company crafts miniature replicas of the shrine. “After 20 years, the shrine we are building will have deteriorated quite a bit. But instead of thinking, ‘It’s a shame to tear down something we worked so hard to build,’ we think, ‘It’s been 20 years, so we want the deity to move into a beautiful, fresh, new shrine.’”
Journalists for The Associated Press are documenting the latest version of this ancient cyclical process, which publicly began this year.
Rebuilding the 125 shrine buildings is a 9-year process
Shinto officials in the priesthood pull a sacred timber on a wheeled platform into a position before unloading and moving it under the roof at the end of Mihishirogi Hoeishiki, a ceremony of the Shikinen Sengu ritual to rebuild main structures of the Jingu shrine complex for Shinto deities, at Toyoukedaijingu, also known as Geku, or the outer sanctuary of Jingu, in Ise, central Japan, Tuesday, June 10, 2025, after the cypress timbers were transported from Nagano prefecture’s Kiso region to the city. (AP Photo/Hiro Komae)
Shinto officials in the priesthood pull a sacred timber on a wheeled platform into a position before unloading and moving it under the roof at the end of Mihishirogi Hoeishiki, a ceremony of the Shikinen Sengu ritual to rebuild main structures of the Jingu shrine complex for Shinto deities,