Geku - outer shrine

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Our first stop in Ise was the Geku, or outer shrine of the Ise Shinto Shrine.  This is the second most sacred location.  We ended up with a gorgeous day although it did turn rather warm!

 This shrine is about a 15 minute walk from the Ise train station.

 I am going to cover a few things in this post that are also applicable to the Geku shrine.  The main shrine building gets rebuilt every twenty years with all new materials.  You can see next to the temple the place that it was before.  It has been rebuilt 62 times making the shrine 1240 years old, founded in 4 BCE.  No photographs are allowed within the area of the main shrine at both shrines.  The style of these two shrines is very different from the other shrines we visited -- they both were built pre-interaction with other cultures (like China and Korea).  
The main shrine within Geku -- this was the closest photograph I could take

All these structures get rebuilt every twenty years
I was astonished at how long we spent in the shrine.  I thought we had been wandering around for just a few minutes, but it proved to be closer to an hour.  It was breathtakingly calm and "zen."  

 Time in shrine: 1 hr
Times visited: 1
Overall: B+
Location: 1 Ujitachicho, Ise, Mie Prefecture 516-0023, Japan

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