Around 3,000 white-robed residents hauled 10 sacred cypress logs through Ise City on Saturday, opening the civic phase of the once-every-twenty-year Okabiki procession that will deliver 360 Kiso-hinoki logs to Ise Jingu for Japan’s 63rd Shikinen Sengu rebuild in 2033. That is according to The Asahi Shimbun, which reported the procession saw the logs purified in the Miyagawa River before participants performed the Donden Gaeshi ritual to shake off the surplus water.
Whilst the morning ritual centred on 10 cypress logs measuring 4.4 to 7 metres in length, participants loaded the timber onto wheeled ceremonial carts called hoeisha and pulled them roughly two kilometres from the Miyagawa riverbed to the Geku Outer Shrine of Ise Jingu, with the kiyari traditional work song carrying across the procession route. Wood Central understands that the weekend hauls for the Geku and Kotaijingu Naiku are scheduled to run for 19 days through August, with the procession drawing participants from across Japan.
Each log delivered to the shrine precincts enters a four-year preparation sequence before a carpenter’s tool touches it, beginning with two years submerged in the timber pond for underwater drying, a year stacked outdoors for seasonal acclimatisation, and a final year of surface polishing and wrapping in Japanese paper. Saturday’s haul follows the earlier ceremonial cut in Nagano Prefecture, where local lumber company operator Soju Ikeda told the Associated Press the woodcutters’ rite “honors the continuity of a tree’s life”, as Wood Central reported on the sacred Ise Shrine rebuild using 13,000 cypress trees for the 63rd Shikinen Sengu.
Beyond the procession itself, the 63rd Shikinen Sengu now enters preparation towards the 2033 transfer ceremony, with shrine craftsmen reconstructing every building at Ise Jingu in the Yuiitsu shinmei-zukuri style without nails, locking roughly 100,000 hand-carved components through joinery passed from master to apprentice. The shrine’s 200-year afforestation programme, begun in 1923 under Taisho-era forest policy, now supplies approximately one-quarter of the timber for the 63rd Sengu, with reclaimed Kiso-hinoki from demolished shrine buildings commanding higher prices than freshly milled material across the 20-year Sengu interval in Japanese timber markets.
The Ise Jingu Administration Office has scheduled the 360-log Okabiki cycle to deliver the full Geku and Naiku timber consignments across two consecutive ceremonial years, with full forest self-sufficiency at Ise Jingu projected ahead of the original 2123 target.
