IT IS A genuine privilege and a pleasure to be here in London to deliver the Carmen Blacker lecture for 2015. I would like to thank Dr Michael Loewe, everybody at SISJAC and the Japan Society for inviting me. Dr Blacker was the most inspiring of my undergraduate lecturers in the Faculty of Onental Studies in Cambndge in the late 1970s; in the 1980s she was for me always a most interested and unfailingly solicitous PhD supervisor. My debts to her are huge. I cannot hope to match her extraordinary eloquence, nor should you expect from me the sorts of insights of which she was always capable. Still, I am confident that the subject I address is one that would have interested her greatly, dealing as it does with myth, pilgnmage and sacred sites. My subject is Ise, less the city of that name than the cluster of shnnes that give meaning to the city. Ise is in Mie Prefecture on the coast of the Ise Shima Peninsula in south central Japan. The most important of its many shnnes are the Outer Shnne in the north of the city where the food deity, Toyouke, is venerated, and the Inner Shnne about 6 km to the south. The Inner Shnne venerates Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, who of course features in the Japanese myths as the great ancestor of the impenal line.

Why address Ise at all? Partly because, since their founding in the seventh century, the Ise Shnnes have always been of immense political, economic and social importance, but mostly because they continue to matter today in twenty-first-century Japan. We need only go back to 2013 for a measure of just how much Ise matters. In 2013, nine million Japanese visited Ise's Inner Shnne. This was a number greater than at any other time in Ise's long history, and some four million more than the previous record set in 1993. 2013 was a special year., of course. For in 2013., the main shrines in Ise were all rebuilt. An aerial image of the Inner Shrine, taken early in summer 2013, helps convey what this involved (Figure 1).