Across Japan, more than seventeen thousand temples stand without priests to tend them — not because faith has fled, but because the people who once sustained these sacred spaces have grown fewer, older, and more scattered. The slow emptying of rural Japan is now reaching its ancient wooden altars, forcing a reckoning between centuries of tradition and the arithmetic of survival. What unfolds is less a story of spiritual decline than of a civilization quietly negotiating which parts of itself it can still afford to carry forward.