March 24, 2010

Miyajima: Floating shrines and rice paddles

It’s a shrine, and it floats!

I recently visited Hiroshima prefecture and stayed overnight on Miyajima, a small island northwest of Hiroshima Bay.

Miyajima (which is officially known as "Itsukushima," but is popularly known as "Miyajima") is a must-see site for any visitor to Hiroshima. The island is known for Itsukushima-jinja, a Shinto shrine with a torii, or gate, that appears to float in the water when it’s high tide. The floating torii (pronounced "to-ree"—rhymes with “story”) is ranked as one of Japan's top three sites.

Although it’s most famous for its torii, Miyajima is also known for a few more things, including: oysters, rice paddles, and leaf-shaped pastries.

When my friend and I first got to Miyajima, we tried out the oysters first. We ate at a restaurant near the bay, each of us ordering oyster donburi—a bowl of oysters, eggs, and onions over rice.

Oysters are famous throughout Hiroshima prefecture, and these did not disappoint—they were fresh, tender, and juicy (not unlike the excellent oysters I’ve eaten in the San Francisco Bay Area, I might add). Yum.

After lunch, it was almost high tide, and we walked over to see the torii. According to Wikipedia, the torii was built in the 12th century, although the current one dates back to the 19th century. It was built so that commoners—who weren’t allowed to set foot on the holy island of Miyajima—would have to sail through the gate at high tide.

I had seen pictures of the torii before in guidebooks and on websites. In person, the torii looks serene and eloquent, surrounded by mountains and the sea. It’s a bright orange-red, a shade that reminded me of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Giving a unique contrast to the eloquent torii are the scruffy-looking deer that roam around Miyajima. Similar to Nara, Miyajima is known for its free-roaming deer, which like to amble around, trying to nab food from sympathetic tourists.

Miyajima is also known for its wooden rice paddles, a phenomenon which baffled me while I was there. Miyajima’s small, quaint streets are filled with shop after adorable shop, most of which have a generous assortment of rice paddles on display. The rice paddles have writing on them that, according to one of my co-workers, have lucky messages, such as “do well at school,” and the like.

It turns out that Miyajima claims to be the spot where a monk named Seishin invented the wooden rice paddle in the 18th century. I’m a bit skeptical about this, with all due respect to Miyajima. Isn’t the 18th century a bit recent for a tool as rudimentary as a wooden rice paddle to be invented? After all, weren’t humans already using spoons in Cro-Magnon days?

Regardless, you can find rice paddles of all sizes in Miyajima. You can even get your face painted on a rice paddle. (I resisted, although I am totally going to get my baby’s face painted on one, if/whenever I have a kid).

And the best part—Miyajima is home to the world’s largest rice paddle. Weighing 2.5 tons and measuring 7.7 meters long, this is one big rice paddle.

Miyajima is also a famous leaf-peeping spot in the fall, and it’s known for selling leaf-shaped pastries year-round. The pastries are called momiji manju and are stuffed with sweet fillings such as red bean paste or chocolate cream. A number of shops make the manju on-site, using machines that reminded me of the Krispy Kreme doughnut machines.

On Miyajima, we stayed at the adorable Guest House Kikugawa, a casual, 8-room inn that features both western-style and Japanese-style rooms. My friend and I stayed in a Japanese-style room.

The room came with complimentary green tea and rice-paddle-shaped cookies.

For an added fee, the friendly owners of the Guest House Kikugawa cook a traditional Japanese dinner (and a Western-style breakfast, for that matter) for their guests. Dinner that night was amazing. An eight-course traditional Japanese meal of local delicacies (for less than 4000 yen!).

Highlights included grilled fish and shrimp:

Oysters cooked Western-style, with cheese on top. Very fresh and delicious:

White fish sashimi that was not for the faint of heart, but was quite delicious for a sashimi-lover like yours truly:

Some sort of mashed root vegetable (it tasted a bit like taro) with salmon roe on top (apologies--I asked the nice elderly owner what most of these dishes are, but unfortunately, I didn’t recognize the Japanese words she used):

A salted fish that was cooked in a similar style to what I’ve eaten when I went leaf-peeping in Takao and hiking in Tsumago, but this one was by far the most delicious. It was tender and not too salty—just right.

To finish things off, dessert! Very delicious green tea ice cream, with an even more delicious sesame-ish mousse-ish confection, plus a strawberry.

Note: At this point, I would like to give a shout-out to the adorable Australian at the table next to mine, who was also taking pictures of every dish he ate, also with a Canon digital SLR. William, if you’re ever in the Kyoto area again, talk to me. (And this is the closest I’ll ever come to putting a winking emoticon in my blog.)

After dinner, we walked over to see the torii again, which is lit up by floodlights at night. Most tourists only visit Miyajima during the daytime, so the streets were very quiet by the time we headed out.

There were a few tourists taking pictures of the torii, which was actually lit up a bit too brightly for my taste. Although my camera tried valiantly, the torii didn’t show up well in my shots. (Special thanks to William for taking some pics of the torii from his camera with my SD card.)

The most unique part of seeing the torii at night was that it was low tide, and we could walk out to the torii. Close up, you can see the whole logs they used to build the torii, and the gentle, natural curves of those logs.

Being so close to the torii, at night, with fewer tourists, made the experience feel much more personal than it had during the daytime. It made the torii feel more mystical. It’s only when you walk up to the torii that you can see the many coins scattered around its base by past visitors. Pretty cool.

The next day, we took the Miyajima Ropeway gondola up Mount Misen, the tallest mountain on the island.

The view from the top of the mountain was gorgeous—you can see south to Shikoku island. The mountains in the distance are layered behind each other—the view reminded me of Byron Bay, Australia. So lovely.

Similar to the Iwatayama Monkey Park in Arashiyama, Mount Misen also features a lot of wild monkeys, along with the obligatory monkey warning signs.

And before we left beautiful Miyajima, we had one more meal. For lunch, I ate udon with a side of anago-meshi, broiled sea eel over rice. Anago is another dish that Miyajima is famous for. It was pretty good, but not spectacular--your standard tasty eel, although the dish I had tasted reheated, alas.