Ise Grand Shrine

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The cypress is cut high in the mountains and carried down to the eastern coast, where the Isuzu River runs clear over its stones. There it is raised, joined wood to wood without a single nail, into a hall with a thatched roof and a floor lifted off the ground, its gable crossed by the forked finials called chigi and weighted along the ridge by the short logs called katsuogi. The hall is unpainted. It is the plainest of great buildings, and it is the holiest ground in the world of the kami — the dwelling of Amaterasu-Ōmikami, the great sun-illuminating deity, from whom the line of emperors descends. This is Ise Jingū, the Grand Shrine of Ise, in what is now Mie Prefecture; and the hall now standing is not old. It was raised within the last two decades, and within two decades it will be taken down, and another raised beside it.

Strictly the place has no single building one can point to and call the shrine. Ise Jingū is a constellation of one hundred and twenty-five sanctuaries spread across the city of Ise and the country around it. Two stand at its center. The Naikū, the Inner Shrine — formally Kōtai Jingū — sits in the town of Uji-tachi south of the city, among forest, across the Isuzu; here Amaterasu is enshrined. Some six kilometers off stands the Gekū, the Outer Shrine — Toyouke Daijingū — where Toyouke-no-Ōmikami, the deity of grain and of food, of clothing and of shelter, is honored. Pilgrims have long walked the road between them. The two shrines, with their attendant sanctuaries, make the whole, and the whole is held to outrank every other shrine in the land.

The mirror carried out from the palace

The genealogy of Ise is, in the tradition’s own telling, the genealogy of a god moving house. The story is set down in the imperial mytho-histories — the Kojiki, completed in 712, and the Nihon Shoki, in 720 — and in the sun-goddess herself the chronicles locate the source of the throne. These works were compiled at the Yamato court to fix in writing the descent of the ruling line from Amaterasu, and the imperial-descent charter they carry is best read as the founding claim of a dynasty rather than as a neutral chronicle. With that distance marked, the story they tell of Ise runs as follows.

When the heavenly grandchild Ninigi was sent down to rule the islands, Amaterasu gave into his keeping a mirror — Yata-no-Kagami, the eight-hand mirror — and told him to revere it as he would revere her own presence. For generations the mirror was kept within the imperial palace itself, beside the sovereign. Then, in the reign of the tenth ruler, Sujin, the chronicles record an unease: it was felt that to dwell under the same roof as so great a deity was a thing too close, too charged, and the mirror was carried out of the palace to be enshrined apart. The search for its permanent home fell, in the reign of the eleventh ruler Suinin, to the imperial princess Yamatohime-no-mikoto. She bore the mirror — and with it the presence of Amaterasu — through many provinces, year upon year, until she came to Ise, to the banks of the Isuzu, and there received the word of the goddess that this was the land in which she wished to dwell forever. So the Naikū was founded. The Gekū came later: in the reign of Yūryaku, the tradition holds, Amaterasu made known that she could not take her food alone, and Toyouke was summoned from afar to attend her, and the Outer Shrine was raised to receive the deity of the divine meals.

That the mirror is one of the three regalia of the throne sets Ise apart from every other holy place. The Three Sacred Treasures — the mirror, the sword Kusanagi, and the curved jewel — pass with the sovereignty itself, and no accession is complete without them. The mirror kept at Ise is the mirror of Amaterasu, the shintai, the god-body in which the deity is present. It is seen by no one. It lies within the innermost hall of the Naikū, wrapped and housed and ringed by four lines of wooden fence, and not the emperor nor the high priest looks upon it. The wrapping is renewed but the object is not displayed. Its invisibility is not concealment of a thing but the proper form of approach to a presence too great to be met with the eyes.

“Origin of Music and Dance at the Rock Door” (Iwato kagura no kigen), nishiki-e woodblock triptych by Shunsai Toshimasa, 1887, depicting Amaterasu emerging from the heavenly cave. Wikimedia Commons, public domain (PD-old).

The plainness and the renewal

What a visitor meets at Ise is, first, an absence of the things that mark the great Buddhist temples — no vermilion lacquer, no gilt, no sweeping tiled roofs in the continental manner, no carved brackets. The buildings are raised in a style called shinmei-zukuri, and the variant reserved to Ise alone is yuiitsu-shinmei-zukuri, the “unique” shinmei style, which by rule may be used for no other shrine. It is held to be the oldest of shrine forms, descended from the raised storehouse of the rice harvest: a rectangular hall of bare hinoki cypress, gabled, thatched in reed, lifted on posts driven straight into the earth, fenced about, entered by a flight of steps. At the center, beneath the floor, stands a short hidden pillar, the shin-no-mihashira, the sacred heart-pillar, never seen. The wood is left as the tree gave it. The whole asserts, against the imported splendor of the temples, that the dignity of the kami is met not by ornament but by purity — by new wood, clean lines, and the open air.

The plainness is bound up with the most remarkable practice of the place. Every twenty years the entire shrine is rebuilt. This is the Shikinen Sengū, the periodic removal. Beside each existing sanctuary lies an empty plot of equal size, the alternate site; and when the cycle comes round, the whole of the Naikū and the whole of the Gekū — the halls, the fences, the treasure-houses, the Uji bridge of cypress that carries pilgrims over the Isuzu, even the sacred objects and furnishings within — are made anew, in fresh timber, by the old crafts, on the empty ground. Then, on a night appointed in autumn, in the rite called the Sengyo, the deity is carried in solemn procession from the old hall to the new, in darkness, screened from sight. The old hall is afterward dismantled, and its ground returns to empty waiting for twenty years more. The shrine keeps a word for what this serves: tokowaka, ever-young, eternal freshness. The buildings die and are reborn on a fixed turn, so that the sanctuary is at once unimaginably ancient and never more than two decades old.

The chronicles attribute the institution of the cycle to the late seventh century, to the ambition of Emperor Tenmu; it was his consort and successor, the Empress Jitō, who carried out the first removal — the Naikū in 690, the Gekū in 692. From that beginning the cycle has run, with interruptions only in the disorder of the medieval wars, for more than thirteen centuries. The sixty-second rebuilding was completed in 2013; the sixty-third is set for 2033, its long train of preparatory rites — the felling of the first trees, their floating and hauling, the cutting of the thatch — beginning many years in advance. The work is, among other things, a means of transmission: each generation of carpenters, joiners, and thatchers learns the craft by doing it once, in the company of those who did it last, and the knowledge of how to raise the shrine is carried forward not in drawings but in hands.

Aerial photograph of the Naikū (Inner Shrine) precinct, 1983, with the main sanctuary and the adjacent empty alternate site visible. Made based on National Land Image Information (Color Aerial Photographs), Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism of Japan — used with attribution.

The daily meal and the kept distance

Beneath the great twenty-year turn runs a daily one. Each morning and each evening the priests of the Gekū prepare and present the divine meal — the Higoto-asayu-ōmikesai, the rite of the sacred food offered at dawn and dusk — to Toyouke and, through Toyouke, to Amaterasu and the kami of the shrines. The offering is exact and plain: rice steamed over a fire kindled by the old friction method, water drawn from a sacred well, salt, dried bonito, fish, seaweed, vegetables, fruit, and rounds of rice wine, set out and removed in fixed order. The tradition holds that this twice-daily meal has been laid before the deity, without a single day’s interruption, for some fifteen centuries — that the kami of Ise has been fed every morning and every evening since the shrine was founded. The greatest of the harvest rites comes in autumn, the Kannamesai, when the first fruits of the year’s rice are offered in mid-October, first at the Gekū and then at the Naikū; of the some fifteen hundred ceremonies that mark the shrine’s year it is reckoned the most important, the gift of the new grain back to the deity from whom the grain is held to come.

For most of Japanese history the kami and the buddhas were worshipped together, the kami understood in the medieval doctrine of honji-suijaku as the local traces of buddhas and bodhisattvas, shrines and temples sharing precincts and personnel. Ise stood, with peculiar firmness, apart. The shrine kept a deliberate distance from Buddhism — a separation later scholars call shinbutsu kakuri, the keeping-apart of kami and buddha — that ran against the syncretic grain of the age. The consecrated imperial princess at Ise was bound by a list of taboo words set down in the tenth-century legal compendium, the Engi-shiki: in her speech a buddha was not to be named a buddha but called nakago, the inner child; a sutra was somegami, dyed paper; a temple, kawarabuki, tile-roofed; a monk, kaminaka, long-hair. The holiest things of the rival religion could not be spoken plainly on the holiest kami ground. This does not mean Ise escaped the Buddhist world — pilgrims and even monks came, and a syncretic literature grew up around the shrine — but it set Ise’s character against the easy fusion found elsewhere, and it furnished the seed of a remarkable medieval theology.

That theology was the work of the Watarai, the priestly house that served the Outer Shrine from ancient times. In the late thirteenth century, in a body of writings later called the Shintō Gobusho and a doctrine known as Watarai Shintō or Ise Shintō, the Watarai priest Ieyuki and his successors made an extraordinary claim: that Toyouke, the deity of their own Gekū, was no mere provider of Amaterasu’s meals but identical with the first kami to appear at the beginning of all things — and so that the Outer Shrine, far from being secondary, held the primordial deity and the higher place. The argument turned the ranking of the two shrines on its head, and it drew, for the first time at Ise, on metaphysical vocabulary borrowed and inverted from the Buddhist and continental learning the shrine otherwise held at arm’s length. Watarai Shintō was among the earliest attempts to articulate the kami tradition as a self-standing system of thought rather than a body of rite and myth, and it fed, centuries on, the larger currents that would eventually shape the very idea of a bounded religion called Shinto.

The throne, the princess, and the multitude

For most of its history Ise was the throne’s own shrine before it was anyone else’s. The bond ran in two directions. From the court came the Saiō, also called the Itsukinomiya — an unmarried imperial princess sent to serve as the consecrated representative of the emperor at Ise, dwelling in ritual purity at a remove from the shrine and attending its great festivals. The chronicles trace the office to Princess Ōku, daughter of Emperor Tenmu, in the late seventh century; it endured, with the line of royal women who held it, until the upheavals of the fourteenth century brought it to an end. From Ise, in return, flowed the deity’s blessing upon the reign. So jealously was this exclusive bond guarded that for a long stretch of its history private offerings to Ise — gifts from any hand but the emperor’s — were forbidden. The shrine of the sun-goddess belonged to the descendant of the sun-goddess, and to him alone.

That exclusivity did not hold against the longing of the people. From the medieval period, and overwhelmingly in the peace of the Edo centuries, Ise became the goal of a vast popular pilgrimage. Bands of devotees pooled their savings in associations and sent representatives, or set out themselves; in certain years a kind of pilgrimage fever swept the country, the okage-mairi, when villagers left their fields and walked to Ise in their hundreds of thousands. The numbers recorded for the great surges are staggering — millions of pilgrims arriving within a span of weeks — and it was reckoned that a sizable fraction of the whole population made the journey at least once. The road to Ise filled with travelers; the town that served them grew rich on their passage. The cult of the throne’s private deity had become, without ceasing to be the former, a current of the common religious life.

The modern reception of Ise is inseparable from the political reordering of the kami tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After the Restoration of 1868, the Meiji state set about constructing what is now called State Shinto (Kokka Shintō) — an apparatus that fused the worship of the kami, the divinity of the emperor, and a modern nationalism into an instrument of the state, and that endured until 1945. Within this construction Ise was placed at the very center: the shrine of the imperial ancestress, funded and protected by the government, with the reigning sovereign himself serving as its supreme priest. It is important to hold the ancient shrine and the modern apparatus distinct. The cult of Amaterasu at Ise is more than a millennium older than State Shinto, and the Meiji architects fashioned their system by selecting, centralizing, and bending an older and far more diffuse devotion to new ends — the same period that forced the long-fused worlds of kami and buddha apart by decree. When the system fell with the empire in 1945, and the emperor in 1946 renounced the claim to manifest divinity, Ise passed out of state hands; today it stands at the head of the Association of Shinto Shrines, no longer an organ of the state but the recognized spiritual heart of the kami tradition.

A wooden torii at the Naikū (Kōtai Jingū) entrance, marking the passage from the ordinary world to the sacred precinct. Photograph by Brakeet, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (public domain dedication).

Ise keeps to its own rhythm through all of this. The pilgrim crossing the Uji bridge over the Isuzu passes from the ordinary world into the shrine’s, washes hands and mouth in the cold river or at the trough, and walks the gravel path beneath the cryptomeria toward a hall he will not be permitted to enter and a mirror he will never see. The architecture among the other great shrines of the land is the most austere; the deity is the highest; the access is the most reserved. And the cycle continues. Somewhere on the holy ground an empty rectangle of raked earth waits beside the standing hall, the timber for the next raising is already growing or already felled, and the carpenters who will join it without nails are learning their hands. The shrine that houses the sun is, by deliberate art, both the oldest thing in the country and among the newest — torn down and built again in living memory, and to be torn down and built again within the memory of a child now born.

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