Miyajima - World Heritage site and one of the 3 most scenic places in Japan

When Jessica went to Hiroshima with us back in March, we wanted to visit both the Atomic Dome and Miyajima in a single afternoon. Even if we had planned the timing perfectly, it really was too much to do in one day. So, Chrissy made me promise that I would bring her back to Miyajima to see the Floating Tori before we left Japan. Between visitors and packing we were so busy that we never made it back, so we decided we would go on our way to Hakata, Korea and home. This is where we spent our last day in Japan.

Miyajima is an island just west of Hiroshima. It houses a small Buddhist community very similar to the community that we visited in Koyasan. There are several temples and pagodas. There are also royokans & monasteries where tourists can spend the night. When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Miyajima housed small boats packed with explosives. Much of Japan’s Navy by the end of the war was on the seabed around the Pacific. They really had no threat against the US Navy. So young men were trained to bring these small boats out of hidden shoals to ram the bigger slower battleships, as the invasion of Japan would begin. The day the bomb was dropped, these small skiffs became ferries that brought survivors and wounded across the narrow channel to the island. Miyajima for the next months became a hospital and later a cemetery for many of those who did not survive.

The floating gate is recognized as one of the three most beautiful spots in Japan. Chrissy couldn’t miss it and neither could I. Saturday morning we rode the bus from Kobe for four hours west to Hiroshima. In Hiroshima we bought two lockers at the train station to stash most of our bags while we began our last tour of Japan, packed just a couple of small bags with our necessaries for the night, and continued on. From Hiroshima station we took a local train for another 45 minute ride to Miyajima. The 540-yen tickets I bought at the train station also covered the 20-minute ferry ride to the island.

On the train, we kept a lookout for an inexpensive hotel. In our planning we had decided to just snag cheap hotels as we moved toward Seoul and home. On the way out toward the island, we didn’t see any of the cheap hotels close to any of the stations. But the cheaper hotels have brighter lights, so we weren’t discouraged and planned to find one on our return to the station that evening in the dark.

As we disembarked the ferry, the skies opened up and began to pour. The rain was hard; a lot like some of the downpours I had seen riding my bike to work. As we bought an umbrella in the ferry terminal we overheard that there would be a festival in front of the Floating Tori in just a few minutes. The rain had forced many of the tourists off of the streets, so our walk was quick. Tame deer roaming the streets slowed us a little and as we neared the Tori we could see that the tide was very low. The rain completely ceased half way to the Tori and the sun came out amplifying the heat in the muggy day.

The Floating Tori stood on dry land a hundred meters from the waters edge at low tide. Tourists and festival watchers had gathered on the shoreline to watch three boats perform rites outside of the mouth of the gate.


People closer in gathered clams and little kids chased small crabs around the sand. A few deer followed the tourists and the festival to the gate. A hundred meters inside the gate a temple complex had been constructed on pillars supporting it above the waters at high tide.

A couple asked us to take their picture, I did. They then took our picture. When I took their picture, I noticed that the girl had the word “F***” emblazoned across her shirt in 5 inch tall letters. While her boyfriend took our picture, I told Chrissy about the shirt. She had completely missed it. When we first arrived in Japan, we would frequently see shirts with rude and offensive words written in English across them, but the longer we lived there, the less we noticed them. I think it only caught my eye because I took their picture with their camera.

The tide rose quickly and we escaped toward the temple on the drier side of shore. Sake barrels lined some of the walkways and a ceremony was being performed in one of the temples. We walked through the complex and exited. Our walk back through town took us through the local tourist shops as they began to close their doors with the fading sunlight. We bought a couple of our last souvenirs, one of which was a chime with a peace crane. Ironically, for the next several days, this “Peace Crane” wind chime was a particular interest to every security checkpoint we passed through. Our luggage was tightly packed so it rode in my carryon the rest of the way home. Whenever the bag was X-rayed they would ask to open the bag to see the box or they would send just the box through the X-ray. I offered several times to open the taped package so that they could see it, but their Far Eastern sensibilities prevented them from allowing me to do just that.

We made it back to the train shortly after dusk. In the dark, it became evident that there weren’t any cheap hotels near any of the stations and we resolved to find a cheap hotel near the JR station in Hiroshima. We found several all within a very short walk of the station, but being the first day of summer vacation. At the second hotel, the desk clerk gave us a hotel map with their phone numbers. Chrissy used her cell, which we never had time to cancel, to call the hotels. I put my map reading skills to work and fed her phone numbers in an ever-expanding perimeter around the station. One hotel had rooms, but they weren’t cheap. They were 25,000 yen a night. One hotel, the woman who answered clearly didn’t speak any English. She just laughed at Chrissy’s question and kept repeating to someone in Japanese, “They are speaking English!” Every hotel we called was filled.

We were tired. We had both slept only a couple of hours our last night in our Japanese home. We didn’t want to sleep with the homeless people in the underground passages beneath the train station. So Chrissy called the expensive hotel again. The last of the 25,000-yen rooms was gone. They only had one room left for 28,000 yen. We took it. The room proved to be a suite that was much larger than our apartment in Nishinomiya. It had a kitchen, living room, dining room, two bathrooms, two TVs, and a very large bedroom. The staff had pushed the full size beds together, making a very large King. Ironically all we had was our bag of necessities. We weren’t prepared for a night of this much luxury. We were simply happy to have a place to sleep. I'm sure another time we would have enjoyed the extravagance much more.