Emperor's Door

There’s a steady trickle of people through that gate even early in the morning. None of them are in this photograph. Thirty seconds behind an ND filter and they simply don’t register — they walk through the frame and the frame doesn’t keep them.

What it does keep is the Ootorii. The nearby plaque told me it came from a 1,500-year-old cypress. What it didn’t say is that this is the second one. The original went up in 1920, cut from a 1,200-year-old tree in Taiwan’s Alishan range, and stood for forty-six years before lightning took it in 1966. The replacement came off Danda Mountain, also in Taiwan, and was finished in December 1975 — twelve metres tall, seventeen across, pillars over a metre thick, thirteen tonnes of it. A Tokyo timber merchant paid for the rebuild as thanks to the shrine for his business.

It was an overcast morning and the path under those trees is dim regardless. I worked several angles and some detail shots, but this dead-on frame is the one — the dark of the trees against that yellow wood and nothing else.

The bottom is cropped deliberately. The approach is asphalt right up to the gate before it turns to gravel, and asphalt does nothing for a torii. Cutting it lets the posts run straight off the edge of the frame, which I feel adds a sense of three dimensionality to the scene.