The most concrete religious obligation in Shinto is groundskeeping. Parishes organise sweeping rotas — the approach raked, the moss cleared off the stone lanterns, the basin scrubbed, the grounds weeded before a festival — and it is done by households in turn rather than by staff. This is not decorative: cleanliness and the sacred are so tightly linked in the tradition that a neglected shrine is not merely untidy but compromised. It is also the load-bearing point of the whole structure and the first thing to fail. In rural Japan, where the young have left, the sweeping falls to a shrinking group of people in their seventies, and a shrine whose parish can no longer clean it is on the way to being deregistered and merged. Priests describe this as the actual crisis of contemporary Shinto, ahead of belief, doctrine or politics.