Shikinen sengū at Ise is the most extraordinary institution in the tradition. Every twenty years the inner and outer shrines, and dozens of subsidiary buildings, are rebuilt from scratch on an adjacent identical plot, in unpainted Japanese cypress with thatched roofs, using joinery and no nails; every one of over a thousand sacred treasures and textiles is remade to the original specification by craftspeople in the appropriate hereditary trades; and the kami is carried across at night, under cloth, by torchlight, with the participants in white. The old buildings are dismantled and the timber distributed to shrines across Japan. It has been performed since 690, interrupted for about a century during the Warring States period, and most recently in 2013; the next is due in 2033. Cost estimates run to around fifty billion yen, raised substantially by public subscription, and the cypress is grown in dedicated forests planted centuries in advance. Its real function is transmission: the crafts survive because they are performed at full scale by each generation rather than studied, and a carpenter can expect to work on two rebuildings in a career.