Every twenty years the holiest building in Shinto is taken down and built again on the lot next door. The lot it leaves is the part I keep thinking about.
At Ise, each of the two main sanctuaries has a twin plot beside it. One holds the shrine. The other is a field of large white pebbles, empty except for a small wooden hut. Inside the hut is a post a little over two metres tall, the shin-no-mihashira, which stood beneath the floor of the previous shrine and is not meant to be seen. When the next shrine goes up on the empty side, the side it left gets a hut of its own. The vacancy is tended for twenty years, then built on.
Ise usually gets told as a riddle about identity — the ship of Theseus in cypress, the buildings of 2013 the sixty-second since the seventh century. I think the riddle misses what the place is doing. It is not trying to be new. It is trying never to become a ruin, and the way it manages that is by keeping one: a ruin with the building subtracted, raked white, holding its place.
It has failed once. Through the civil wars no one could pay, and from 1462 to 1585 the Inner Shrine went more than a century without a rebuilding. For that stretch it was simply allowed to get old.
The old wood does not disappear, either. The great pillars come down and become the torii at either end of the Uji Bridge, where they stand another twenty years. Then they move again, to gates at Seki-no-Oiwake and Shichiri-no-Watashi on the old roads pilgrims walked to get here.
So the oldest wood at Ise is at the edges, weathering at crossroads. At the center there is a hut on a field of stones, a post inside it, and a place being kept for 2033.