The shimenawa — a twisted rice-straw rope hung with folded paper streamers — marks a boundary rather than an object, and what it encloses is a place where the kami is understood to be, not a representation of one. It goes around ancient trees, rock formations, waterfalls, the paired Meoto Iwa rocks in the sea at Futami, sumo champions, and the entrance to a sanctuary. The reported experience is consistent and modest: stillness, a sense of scale, the specific quality of being near something much older that is not attending to you. The tradition makes a strong claim about this — that the awe is a response to something present rather than a projection — and equally makes no demand that anyone assent to the claim. Yorishiro is the technical term for an object a kami can occupy, and the older layer of the tradition, before shrine buildings existed, consisted essentially of marked natural sites visited at the right time of year. A number of shrines, including Ōmiwa in Nara, still have no sanctuary because the mountain is the object.