Tokowaka in Memoir

The Shinto Concept of Renewal

Tokowaka is a Japanese concept originating in the Shinto belief system that to remain eternal and fresh, and to maintain divinity, an object needs to go through a regular process of renewal. It technically means “always young”, but what westerners would consider eternal youth entirely fails to convey the complexity of the idea of tokowaka.

When Japanese people think about what to them embodies the concept of tokowaka, the usual example is the Jingu shrine in Ise. This shrine undergoes a tokowaka renewal process every twenty years called Shikinen Sengu. Shikinen Sengu is not the cosmetic facelift you might think, however. It is rather the process of completely destroying the sacred shrine and rebuilding it in its entirety in an alternate site using new materials.

How can something be considered eternal if it only exists for twenty years? is a question I asked myself when I first visited Ise in the summer of 2008. I lived in Japan during a semester of law school, and as part of my final t…