Note To Reader: Vogue does not advocate for piracy or hacking in any form, and firmly believes that everyone should buy movie tickets.

Two rivers run through the Japanese city of Ise—the Miya, which stretches far to the west across Mie Prefecture, and the Isuzu, whose entire length is contained within city limits. Follow the Isuzu’s mouth, in the north, down into the foothills of the surrounding mountains, and halfway to its source you’ll stumble upon a short, wide wooden bridge. This is Ujibashi, the entryway to the most sacred site in Japan: a dense cypress forest that contains a complex of shrines, chief among them the storied Kotai Jingu.

Shrines serve a different purpose in Shinto practice than their Western counterparts. Rather than being houses of worship that shelter the faithful, Shinto shrines are built as homes for the gods themselves (Kotai Jingu is said to be the dwelling of the sun goddess Amaterasu and to hold a legendary mirror called Yata no Kagami). Visitors are discouraged from taking photos of Kotai Jingu, and can pray and pay their respects outside its many concentric perimeters of wooden fencing.

Every two decades, the shrine, the bridge that leads to it, and much of the rest of the site are all dismantled and assembled anew, piece for piece. In practical terms, this ritual is a way to ensure younger generations learn the original, labor-intensive (and nail-free) construction methods that were used to build the complex almost 2,000 years ago. The greater ambition is to impart some spiritual lesson in impermanence, and of nature’s penchant for cycles. The most recent reconstruction took place in 2013.

Kotai Jingu presents a thorny metaphysical question: Can it be said that this is the same shrine that’s been worshipped over the centuries, when its component parts are only four years old? Has it become something else? What is it, exactly, that makes Kotai Jingu itself?

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This was the encrypted message I sent to the most disreputable captains of media piracy in my social network, to no response. The sun, obscured by cloud cover, was just about to set. Unable to wait any longer, I called one of the freebooters direct, which I knew would annoy him.