Shinto priests dressed in starched robes bang drums and march to Ise Jingu's inner shrines for prayers in western Japan.

Every two decades for the last 1,300 years, Japan’s most revered Shinto shrine carries out a series of rituals to mark so-called Shinkinen Sengu – a festival where the whole of Ise complex is knocked down and rebuilt from scratch.

“You can count with one hand the number of times you’ll witness something like this in your lifetime, so I really felt it was a rare and precious sight,” says Yuto Nakase, a local resident witnessing the ceremonies for the first time.

At night the priests assemble with lanterns and march to the mountains for a secret purification rite for a sacred pillar that will be enshrined beneath the floor of the main sanctuary.

The ceremony is off-limits to spectators, but shrine officials say that the priests declare to the deity, who lives at the base of the tree to be used for the pillar, that the tree will be respectfully felled. After the tree is cut down with a special axe, it is wrapped in white cloth, straw mats and reed mats.

The demolition and reconstruction costs around $390 million in a process lasting nine years.

It requires the country's finest carpenters, woodcutters, builders and artisans to pour their hearts into the smallest details of structures that are doomed from the minute they begin working.

Ise's inner shrine is dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu who has been enshrined for two millennia among the mountains of Mie prefecture, on the banks of the Isuzu River.

Thousands gather to see the rebuilding ceremonies, some of about 7 million pilgrims a year who converge on the shrine, which has long been the polestar for Shinto devotees.

All 125 shrine buildings will be knocked down and identical structures will be rebuilt using time-tested building techniques.

There are 33 accompanying festivals and ceremonies, cumulating in a 2033 ritual that will see the presiding deity transferred to the new shrine.

The structures will only stand for about a decade before the project begins all over again.

Deep in the Japanese Alps, woodcutters felled the first set of sacred timbers in a ceremony known as Misomahajime-sai. The two 300-years-old trees will be used to make the vessels that will house the sacred objects enshrining the deities.

Mitsuo Hashimoto, 72, the head woodcutter, is taking part for the third time in the ceremony. He says the group practiced for four or five years for this ceremony.

““Leaving parts of the tree uncut requires extreme precision...Even a tiny adjustment can cause the tree to land two or three meters off,” explains Hashimoto.

To ensure trees fall safely, the woodcutters focus intensely on the precision of their cutting and on the tension of the tree they're working on.

A tree cutting ceremony shows the attention to detail given to Ise's rebuilding.

In the forests of Nagano prefecture, a woodcutter takes the tip of a freshly felled tree and inserts it into a stump.

The assembled woodcutters then pray and bow together in front of the stump, part of another ceremony commemorating the cypress that will be used to rebuild Ise.

Cypress groves are specially planted for the never-ending construction, and their cultivation often exceeds individual human lifespans, with responsibilities passed from generation to generation.

“The fact that a festival which began over 1,200 years ago is still carried out every 20 years is something truly extraordinary,” says Soju Ikeda, the head of Mitsuogiri tree cutting preservation society.

Over the following days, dozens of men dressed in traditional clothing drag the two-ton logs through the Isuzu River to the shrine, chanting rhythmically as they pull, knee-deep in the water.

Hundreds of locals later sing traditional songs as they carry logs for the shrine on carts through Ise's narrow streets.

“The political capital of Japan may be Tokyo, but the fact that this shrine, known as the spiritual home of the Japanese people, is located here in my hometown is something we, as Ise residents, are truly proud of,” says Kawanishi.

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