In Japan, there is a 2,000-year-old shrine known as Ise Jingu. It’s a treasured monument for the Japanese people. So valuable, in fact, that they regularly destroy it. Every 20 years, the Jingu shrine is meticulously deconstructed and then rebuilt by the local community. The regular rebuilding is the secret to the shrine’s longevity. When historic buildings are lost in the West, they’re often lost forever because the knowledge of how to rebuild them disappears with the structure itself. But by rebuilding Ise Jingu every generation, the Japanese ensure that the structure never outlives the memory of how to create it—and therefore it can always be rebuilt. Ise Jingu is a powerful metaphor for cultural know-how. And it’s a perfect picture of the challenge presented to the contemporary mortuary.

How so? Learn more in this powerful NFDA blog post by Eric Layer, author of The Right Way of Death: Restoring the American Funeral Profession to Its True Calling. 

Read the Blog.