At a small Shinto shrine in the Japan Southern Alps I met a local man who came to the shrine at dawn to pray. He kindly gave me permission to film though I only did so for a short while out of respect for his prayers. Later, the man and I talked and he told me that the village I was hiking through has been settled for five hundred years, though humans have lived in this valley for more than a thousand years. The man told me that he comes to the shrine every morning to pray and to clean and care for the shrine. When I asked if he was a Shinto priest he told me that he supposed that he was the closest his village had to a proper priest, though technically he is not ordained.
