I found it elsewhere: "The most recent rebuilding required 14,000 cypress timbers, 25,000 sheaves of reeds, took 9 years to complete, and cost over $500 million."
"Obtaining large enough timber posts, for instance, requires trees 300 to 500 years old"
I seriously hope they can give it a rest for a while.
> Every 20 years exact copies of Naiku, Geku, and 14 other shrines are built on empty sites next to the existing structures
> the rebuilding also includes creating exact copies of thousands of ceremonial treasures and artifacts
But the real value in this whole deal is that the entire reconstruction happens using traditional techniques, passing them on to the next generation.
$500 million feels like a steal for preserving your cultural heritage like that.
Religion in Japan is big business, just like your home country. Rest assured that when you visit a shrine in Japan, the first thing to greet you will be an offering box.
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https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/busting-o...
That's a very western way of looking at things.
Alternatively, it can be viewed as a community crowdsourcing and preserving culture.
Most western people also view donating to religious institutions is a way of supporting their communities and culture. Collectivism isn't a monopoly of the east.
Is that why people in the West refuse to wear mask?
(Same goes for most modern forms of Buddhism.)
So the Meiji government traveled back in time a thousand years and erected Shinto shrines all over Japan?
I’ve been to 47 prefectures of Japan and thousands of shrines. I’m well aware imperial shrines exist.
Just because American politicians utilize the word God does not mean they invented Christianity.
The Christian-like wedding ceremonies are more recent than that I guess.
I’m sure the USA builds more backyard sheds than that, at a higher price tag, every year.
https://theprepared.org/features-feed/ise-jingu-and-the-pyra....
80,000 is number of shrine in the entire region.
Since they've been doing it for 1400 years, superstitiously inclined people will be adamantly against making changes to the interval.
> As we walked from arch to arch, Maholo explained that the forest here had historically been used exclusively to harvest timbers for all the shrines, but over the last millennia they had been harvested too heavily for various war efforts, or lost in fire. Since the beginning of this century the shrines’ caretakers have been bringing these forests back, and expect them to be self-sustaining again within the next two or three rebuilding periods — 40 to 60 years from now.
Part of this is also a preservation of skills. It ensures that the artisans who work on it have a consistent demand for their skills.
This was revealed in particular after the huge landslides of 2021, as a forest holding together the soil had been silently harvested much more than what was reported.