Religious Art & Worldviews · Artists
The master shrine carpenters who rebuild Ise Jingu every twenty years with hand tools and unjoined cypress — a craft transmitted by being performed.
Tagged: Architecture Sacred Landscape Ancient Devotional Sacred Carpentry Jinja Shinto Shinto
The miyadaiku, palace carpenters, are Japan's hereditary shrine builders. At Ise their knowledge has exactly one curriculum: the shikinen sengu, the twenty-year rebuilding, in which each generation of carpenters learns the joints by raising the shrine beside its elder copy.
No individual name leads this record because the tradition itself is collective: the pictured shrine is their work, rebuilt by their line in 2013 for the sixty-second time.
References
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