While reading “Here Comes Everybody”, I came across an illustration that I believe is more useful as a parable. Think about it.
The Ise Shrine, a Shinto shrine in Ise, Japan, has occupied its current site for over thirteen hundred years. Despite its, advanced age, however, UNESCO, the UN cultural agency, refused to list the shrine in its list of historic places. Why? Because the shrine is made out of wood, never a material prized for millennium-scale structural integrity, and so it can’t be thirteen hundred years old. The Imbe priests who keep the shrine know that too, but they have a solution. They periodically tear the shrine to the ground, and then, using wood cut from the same forest that the original was built from, they rebuild the shrine to the same plan, on an adjacent spot. They do this every couple of decades and have done it sixty-one times in a row. (The next rebuilding will be in 2013.) Because the purpose of the shrine is in part to delineate the difference between sacred and ordinary space, from their point of view they have a thirteen-hundred-year old shrine, built out of renewable materials. This argument didn’t wash with UNESCO; the places they list enjoy the solidity of edifice, not of process.
A wrecked castle that has stood unused for five hundred years makes the cut; a shrine that is rebuilt once a generation for a thousand years doesn’t.