Kegare is a state, contracted rather than committed, and the rules about it govern who may approach. Death is the strongest source — the bereaved traditionally abstain from shrine visits, kamidana offerings and festivals for around fifty days, and shrine gates are sometimes papered over during a household mourning. Blood is the other, which brought menstruation and childbirth under the same heading, and produced exclusions that are now the tradition's most obviously indefensible surviving feature. Most shrines have dropped them without announcement; the visible holdouts are specific festivals that bar women, and sacred mountains, of which Mount Ōmine in Nara remains formally closed to women and is periodically the subject of protest and of UNESCO discomfort. The Meiji government abolished many such prohibitions in 1872 and they persisted anyway. Defenders argue the categories were never about moral inferiority; the counter-argument is that a rule which in practice keeps women off the mountain does not become acceptable because its rationale is metaphysical.