The article offers a cosmological vision in which cyclical time regulates practices, thereby offering an alternative to western forms of conservation in use at present. Every twenty years the Ise Temples are taken apart to be reconstructed following a ritual laid down to the last detail by a thousand-year-old tradition. In this way sacred buildings and their linkage function between human and divine are preserved. The description of sacred architecture and conservation rituals reveal the present-day vitality of this historical memory. In the West, on the contrary, despite the development of a historical culture in which knowledge and memory are closely linked, conservation is often synonymous with the total removal of the essential symbolic elements.