Himuro Shrine

This guide to Himuro Shrine in Nara follows a puzzle in wood: after Mount Kasuga's ice cellars sat abandoned for a century and a half, the shrine returned in 859, but no record survives of when its dance stage first went up. It traces that stage, built for masked bugaku dances performed only for emperors, and the shrine's four-legged gate, whose heavy doors were salvaged from an imperial palace in Kyoto during renovations in 1641. Officials studying the stage's joinery can only date it to roughly the seventeen hundreds, with no foundation stone to settle the question.