Sumiyoshi Jinja (Chikuzen)

Sumiyoshi Jinja, Hakata.

In the heart of Fukuoka City, surrounded by the office towers of one of Japan's busiest commercial districts, sits the oldest of three great Sumiyoshi shrines.

Of the three, this is the original. The Sumiyoshi shrines of Osaka and Shimonoseki both date their lineage back to this site. Hakata Sumiyoshi has stood here for at least seventeen hundred years.

What is most striking about this shrine is the architecture. The main hall is built in a style called Sumiyoshi-zukuri — straight lines, no curved roof, no decorative carving, the wood left unpainted. It is one of the oldest surviving forms of Japanese shrine architecture, predating the influence of Chinese building styles. This is what shrines actually looked like at the very beginning, before the elaborate decoration that came later.

Standing in front of it, you are looking at something that, in spirit, is two thousand years old. Even though the wood has been replaced, the form has not.

In the surrounding city, glass towers rise. Subway trains run beneath the ground. Salarymen in business suits hurry past on their lunch breaks, sometimes pausing to bow at the gate.

Twelve hundred-year-old camphor trees grow inside the grounds. Their trunks are massive. The trees are older than the city around them.

Stand at the gate. The trees are above you. The skyscrapers are behind them.

Some places hold the original version of something the world later forgot was simple.