ISE, Japan (AP) — Every two decades for the last 1,300 years, Ise Jingu, Japan’s most revered Shinto shrine, has been knocked down and rebuilt from scratch.

The massive, $390 million demolition and construction job takes about nine years. It requires the country’s finest carpenters, woodcutters, builders and artisans to pour their hearts into the smallest details of structures that are doomed from the moment the work begins.

The buildings at Ise will only stand for about a decade before the project starts all over again, but as the priests consecrate the construction, the workers shout: “A building for 1,000 years! 10,000 years! A million years and forever!”

Journalists for The Associated Press are documenting the latest version of this ancient cyclical process, which publicly began thi

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