Heritage Walking
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Itsukushima Shrine & Omotesando: Torii, Tides and Temples

From the ferry pier through the souvenir street to the shrine that stands in the sea, then the unfinished hall, the great torii from the quiet shore, two temples and a maple valley. Nine stops, about 75 minutes, ending on the old main street near the pier.

This is a self-guided walk, not a guided tour with a leader: no booking, no fixed start time. See the walking route and the walking map before you go, then follow the numbers — the audio guide plays by itself as you reach each stop. Free, with no app to install and no sign-up.

At ~75 min it fits a half day of independent travel, and joining it to another walk in Miyajima makes a full-day itinerary.

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Miyajima, Japan · ~75 min · 3.2 km · 9 stops

Stops on this walk

1. Miyajima Pier

The ferry lands on an island that was worshipped before anyone lived on it.

Look out over the water toward the mainland. The ferry from Miyajimaguchi takes about ten minutes, and two companies run it, the JR West ferry and the Matsudai line. Now turn to the island. The wooded mountain behind the town is Misen. Its formal name is Itsukushima. The name is explained as the island of worship, and that is the key to everything you will see here. For centuries the island itself was treated as a god. The shrine's own account says that in the year 593 a local chieftain named Saeki no Kuramoto received a divine message. He built a shrine on a shore where the tide comes and goes. The island itself was revered as a god, and the shrine was set on the water's edge rather than on its slopes. In 1643 the Confucian scholar Hayashi Shunsai named this island one of the three finest views in Japan, and the label has stuck. In 1996 the shrine and its setting were added to the World Heritage list. You may see deer on the pier. They are wild animals, not pets. The city of Hatsukaichi, which governs the island, asks visitors to keep a distance and not to feed them. Feeding drew the herds into the town and made them unwell. Keep paper and plastic out of reach. The city reports that deer swallow such things and fall ill. Since October 2023 most visitors arriving by boat pay a visitor tax of one hundred yen, collected with the ferry fare. The money goes to keeping the island as it is.

The pier has lockers, toilets and the tourist office. Deer wander here freely. Do not hold food or maps loosely, and step around them rather than through them.

2. Omotesando Shopping Street

Eighty shops on a pilgrim road, and a maple-leaf cake invented for a hot spring inn.

Look up at the roof over the street, then down the line of shopfronts. This is Omotesando, the main approach to the shrine, and the tourist association counts more than eighty shops along it. Most of what is sold here was made for pilgrims and day visitors. Oysters from the bay, grilled on the spot. Conger eel over rice. Wooden rice scoops, which the island has carved for generations, and carved wooden goods known as Miyajima bori. The sweet you will see in almost every window is momiji manju, a small sponge cake shaped like a maple leaf with bean paste inside. It was created around 1906 by a confectioner named Takatsu Tsunesuke, at the request of the Iwaso inn in the maple valley behind the shrine. The shape was registered as a trademark in 1910. Today the cake is sold all over Hiroshima, and some shops on this street bake it in front of you. The street ends at a flight of stone steps and the open shore. The shrine lies beyond, and this is the way its visitors have walked to it for generations.

Eat grilled oysters and cakes at the stall, not while walking, the deer will take food from your hand. Most shops close around five, earlier in winter.

3. Senjokaku, the Unfinished Hall

Hideyoshi ordered a hall for a thousand sutras. He died, and the work simply stopped.

Look at the size of the wooden hall beside you. Its sides have no walls, only pillars. If you enter the hall, look up. There is no ceiling. The rafters and the underside of the roof are open to view. The hall was never finished. The hall was ordered in 1587 by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who was then uniting Japan. He commissioned the monk Ankokuji Ekei to build a great sutra hall here, where priests would chant a thousand copies of a sutra for the dead of his wars. The floor was laid out large enough for eight hundred and fifty seven tatami mats, which is why everyone calls it Senjokaku, the hall of a thousand mats. Then Hideyoshi died suddenly in 1598, and the hall has stood unfinished ever since. Look at the edge of the roof. The round end tiles carry gold leaf. The tourist association points to them as the clue to what this would have become, a hall in the lavish taste of the Momoyama period. The emptiness you see is the other half of the story. After 1868 the government ordered Buddhism and Shinto to be separated. The Buddha images were carried down the hill to the temple Daigan-ji, and in 1872 the hall was renamed Hokoku Shrine, with Hideyoshi himself as the god. The building is an Important Cultural Property. The tall pagoda next to the hall, built in 1407, is wrapped in scaffolding for repairs. The tourist association schedules the work until December 2026 and notes that it may be extended. Until then, its red tiers are hidden.

Entry to the hall floor costs one hundred yen and you take your shoes off. The pagoda interior is never open, and the exterior is under wraps during repairs scheduled until December 2026, possibly longer.

4. Itsukushima Shrine Entrance 厳島神社

A palace-style shrine built on the tide, with gaps in its floor to let the storm sea through.

Stand at the ticket gate and look along the covered corridor in front of you. It runs out over the shore on stone piers. At high tide the sea comes under the floorboards. At low tide you see sand and the piers. The shrine was built for both. The shrine's own history begins in 593, when the local chief Saeki no Kuramoto chose a site where the water comes and goes. The buildings you see owe their shape to 1168. In that year the warlord Taira no Kiyomori rebuilt the shrine in the style of an aristocratic palace, with halls joined by open corridors. The main hall was rebuilt again in 1571 by the lord Mori Terumoto, and the worship halls in front of it date from 1241, after a fire. The shrine lists six buildings as National Treasures and eleven more as Important Cultural Properties. The three goddesses worshipped here are the daughters of the sun goddess Amaterasu and are honored as protectors of the sea. The corridors are about two hundred and sixty meters long. If you go in, look down at the floor. The boards are laid with gaps between them. The shrine explains that the gaps let storm water push up through the floor instead of lifting it, and drain away again when the sea falls. Inside, the raised stage in front of the main hall is counted among the three great stages of Japan, with those of Shitennoji in Osaka and Sumiyoshi Shrine. From the worship hall the great torii stands straight ahead across the water, about two hundred meters out, and the whole shrine is laid out on that line. Admission is three hundred yen, or five hundred with the treasure hall. The gates open at half past six in the morning on almost every day of the year, and close between five and six thirty depending on the season.

The visiting route inside runs from this entrance through the corridors to an exit on the far side. If you do not go in, public lanes on the landward side lead around the shrine. Watch your footing on the gapped floor, heels catch in it.

5. Daigan-ji Temple

The temple at the shrine's exit, where the goddess of the sea was moved in 1868.

Look at the temple gate and the hall behind it, a few steps from where the shrine corridor ends. A Buddhist temple this close to a Shinto shrine is not an accident. Before 1868 Shinto and Buddhist worship on the island were closely intertwined, and this temple, with Daisho-in up the valley, had close ties to the shrine. Daigan-ji belongs to the Koyasan branch of Shingon Buddhism. Daigan-ji's principal deity is Itsukushima Benzaiten. The temple also houses a seated Yakushi Buddha among its important Buddhist images. Its founder is not known. The tourist association records that a monk named Ryokai restored it between 1201 and 1203. What the temple is known for is Benzaiten, the goddess of water, music and fortune. Until 1868 she was enshrined in the main hall of Itsukushima Shrine itself. When the new government ordered Buddhism and Shinto separated, the image had to leave the shrine. It was carried here. It is a hidden image, shown to the public once a year, on the seventeenth of June. The same order brought other images here. The seated Shakyamuni that once sat in the great unfinished hall on the hill is one of them. The reception room of the temple has one more claim. In 1866, during the war between the shogunate and the Choshu domain, the shogunate's envoy Katsu Kaishu met Choshu's men in this room. The fire hall beside the main hall is new, rebuilt in 2006, and holds a statue of Fudo carved entirely from sandalwood.

The grounds are free and open in daylight. The main hall is entered for prayer, so keep quiet inside, and photograph the buildings rather than the altars.

6. The Great Torii from Nishimatsubara

Sixty tons of camphor wood standing in the sea on nothing but its own weight and a bed of piles.

Look out across the water at the vermilion gate. From this shore you see it side on, with the shrine corridors behind it. The gate stands about two hundred meters in front of the worship hall, and the whole shrine is aligned on it. It is sixteen point six meters high, the top beam is twenty four meters long, and the whole structure weighs about sixty tons. The two main pillars are single camphor trunks, chosen because camphor resists water and insects. The four smaller pillars that brace them front and back are cedar. That bracing is what makes it a ryobu torii, a style used at shrines that once had Buddhist halls. The gate is not fixed to the seabed. The pillars simply rest on it. Under each one the builders drove pine piles into the sand, and the box-shaped beams on top are filled with several tons of stones to weigh the gate down. Wind and waves push against it, and its own weight holds it. A gate has stood here since Kiyomori's time in the twelfth century. Rotting timber in the sea has to be replaced, and this is the latest in a long line, raised in 1875. In 1950 damaged sections of the pillars were cut out and new camphor spliced in. The most recent repair ran from June 2019 to December 2022, when the joints were reinforced with stainless steel bands and the gate was unwrapped again. The two name boards differ. The one facing the sea reads Itsukushima Shrine. The one facing the shrine uses older characters for the same name. At high tide the gate appears to float. At low tide, when conditions and any on-site restrictions allow, people walk across the sand to its foot.

Check the tide table at the tourist office if you want to walk to the gate. The flat floods quickly as the tide turns, so leave as soon as the water reaches the sand around you.

7. Daisho-in Temple 大聖院

The oldest temple on the island, which once ran the shrine's rites from the foot of Mount Misen.

Look up the stone steps to the gate with the two guardian figures. Behind it the halls climb the hillside in terraces, and behind them rises Mount Misen. This is Daisho-in, the head temple of the Omuro branch of Shingon Buddhism on the island. The temple's own account says it was founded in 806 by the monk Kukai, known as Kobo Daishi. He is said to have practiced on the mountain above on his way home from China. Historians cannot confirm his visit, and the temple records it as tradition. What is documented is the temple's role. Until the Meiji era it held the office that conducted the Buddhist services and festivals of Itsukushima Shrine. The monks who served the shrine answered to this temple. If you climb to the halls, the tourist association's guide tells you what each holds. The Kannon hall keeps an eleven-headed Kannon. The Chokugando was a prayer hall for Emperor Toba. Its image of Fudo with a sword is said to have sailed as the guardian of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's war fleet to Korea in the 1590s. The Maniden is dedicated to the three demon deities of Mount Misen, which the temple says it alone enshrines. In the Meiji era the statesman Ito Hirobumi was a devoted visitor and paid for improvements to the trail up the mountain. The trail still begins here, about two and a half kilometers to the summit. The temple has suffered with the mountain. A typhoon in 1991 did heavy damage to the main compound and to the halls on the peak.

The grounds are free. Visitors turn the rows of metal prayer wheels on the stair rails as they climb, and remove shoes to enter the halls.

8. Momijidani Park

A maple valley rebuilt as a garden after a landslide buried it in 1945.

Look at the stream in front of you and at the stones that line it. The banks are built of boulders fitted together, and the stream drops over them in steps. It looks like a garden. It is a flood defense. This is Momijidani, the maple valley, at the foot of Mount Misen behind the shrine. The tourist association counts about seven hundred maples here. Around five hundred and sixty are the small-leaved iroha maple, about a hundred are the larger omomiji, and the rest are other kinds. In mid to late November they turn red. In spring and summer the valley is green. On the seventeenth of September 1945 the Makurazaki typhoon struck the island. A landslide started in the upper valley, and the debris flow came down this stream, burying the bridge, the inns, and the shrine itself. The war had ended only weeks before, and the country had little money or material. Restoration ran from 1948 to 1950 as an erosion control project. Because this was a historic and scenic site, the lower part of the stream was built in a style called garden erosion control. The boulders the flow had brought down were stacked without being cut, and the trees along the banks were left standing. The engineers used natural stones to blend the flood-control works into the valley. Concrete sections were concealed behind stone. Walk a little way up the path and look at how the stones are set at each step of the stream.

The park is free and open at all hours. The ropeway to the mountain starts further up the valley. Deer rest under the trees here, give them room.

9. Machiya Street

The Edo-period main street, built on land reclaimed from the sea, where islanders still live.

Look along the street. Two-story wooden houses with tiled roofs and lattice fronts stand shoulder to shoulder, and many of them are homes, not shops. This is Machiya Street, one of the old approaches to the shrine, and the tourist association describes it as the main street of the town in the Edo period. The ground under your feet was once sea. The street runs on land reclaimed from the shore, and the houses were built on the fill. That tells you how the town grew. The island was sacred, and the usable flat land was almost nothing, so the townspeople made their own. Walk slowly and look at the details. Wooden lattices on the ground floor, and narrow frontages. Deer wander here too. The city manages them as wildlife and asks residents and visitors alike to keep a distance, so that the herd stays in the forest rather than in the kitchens. The street runs north, parallel to the covered shopping street, toward the ferry pier. If the shopping street is the island showing its face to visitors, this is the island at home.

People live here. Keep voices down, do not photograph into doorways, and stay on the street side of the gutters. The pier is about five minutes north on foot.