Hundreds of Japanese residents pulled ropes tied to ceremonial carts loaded with freshly hewn cypress logs through the streets of Ise City this week, opening preparations to completely rebuild one of Japan’s most sacred Shinto shrine complexes, as the country has done without interruption once every 20 years for more than thirteen centuries. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported that the procession unfolded over two days on 13 and 14 April, with workers floating the logs upstream by boat on the Isuzu River before hauling them by hand over roughly two kilometres of city streets to the rhythmic call of “Enya, enya.“
The procession marks the start of the 63rd Shikinen Sengu, the ancient Shinto ritual in which shrine carpenters tear down every structure at Ise Shrine and rebuild it on an adjacent site using traditional joinery before priests transfer the presiding deities to the new buildings. The shrine complex encompasses two main sanctuaries — the Naiku inner shrine dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu and the Geku outer shrine dedicated to the deity of food and industry — along with 14 affiliated shrines, torii entrance gates, and a 100-metre wooden bridge spanning the Isuzu River.
The timber-carrying festival, known as Okihiki, is a civic tradition in Ise that has run continuously for more than 550 years and is one of only two events in the entire decade-long ceremony in which ordinary residents can participate, drawing children, parents and elderly residents alongside neighbourhood associations from more than 80 towns across the Ise area. A representative of the shrine told Metropolis Japan that Okihiki runs as a town festival open to school children and families, whilst invitees alone witness the Sengyo — the nocturnal ceremony in which priests transfer the deities to the new buildings.
Shrine carpenters require 13,000 Kiso-hinoki cypress trees sourced from national forests in the Kiso and Ura-Kiso regions of Nagano Prefecture, milled into roughly 100,000 individual components, to reconstruct the complex in its entirety — with 360 logs carried into the precincts across the two consecutive years of the Okihiki festival. Carpenters select the cypress for its durability, its natural resistance to moisture without treatment, and a quality that inverts the logic of most timber markets: reclaimed hinoki from demolished shrine buildings commands higher prices than freshly milled material, because the wood deepens in both lustre and structural stability across the decades it spends inside a building.
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 a lumber pond — a process known as underwater drying that draws out extraneous oils from the wood. Shrine workers then stack the logs outdoors for a further year to acclimatise across all four seasons, before a final year of surface polishing and wrapping in Japanese paper — a preparation discipline tied to the specific resin behaviour of aged Kiso-hinoki that shrine carpenters have not shortened or substituted across any of the 62 completed cycles on record.
Shrine carpenters construct the buildings entirely without nails, locking hundreds of thousands of components together through the same hand-carved joinery building system that defines Hōryū-ji, the world’s oldest surviving wooden building and the ongoing Shuri Castle restoration — a tradition maintained since the 7th century without shortening or substituting a single joint. Shinto priest Yosuke Kawanishi told the Associated Press the shrine’s carpenters do not mourn the demolition: “We think it’s been 20 years, so we want the deity to move into a beautiful, fresh, new shrine,” he said.
The shrine redistributes salvaged beams and posts from demolished structures to affiliated shrines across the Jingu network rather than discarding them, a recirculation practice maintained across every one of the 62 completed cycles and one that predates any formal concept of circular materials economy by roughly a millennium. The 20-year interval serves two purposes the shrine treats as inseparable: the ritual renewal of the deity’s dwelling, and the direct passage of joinery technique from the carpenters who built the current shrine to the apprentices who will tear it down and rebuild it in 2033.
The shrine runs its timber supply on a planning horizon that no national government carbon target currently matches, with a 200-year afforestation programme begun in 1923 under Meiji-era forest policy — maintained without interruption through war, occupation and reconstruction — replanting Kiso-hinoki cypress in the Kyuikirin forest toward full self-sufficiency. The shrine’s own forests now supply approximately one-quarter of the timber for the 63rd Sengu, with that share increasing each cycle and full self-sufficiency projected ahead of the original 2123 target.
The 62nd Shikinen Sengu drew a record 10 million visitors when it concluded in October 2013, compared with the shrine’s annual pilgrimage figure of more than 7 million. The Ise Jingu Administration Office has confirmed the Okihiki festival will continue for a second year, with all 360 logs to be delivered before carpenters begin timber preparation ahead of the 2033 completion target.
