Itsukushima Shrine

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Itsukushima Shrine is a Shinto sanctuary on the island of Itsukushima — commonly called Miyajima, “shrine island” — in the Inland Sea of western Japan, near Hiroshima. Its halls and corridors are raised on pillars over a tidal cove, so that at high water they appear to float; the great vermilion torii gate stands offshore in the shallows, framed by the sea rather than by land. That arrangement is the source of the shrine’s fame, and also of its meaning: the whole island has long been treated as sacred ground, and to keep worshippers from setting foot directly on holy soil, the buildings were placed where the tide itself would mediate between visitor and divinity.

The shrine is dedicated to three goddesses — the Munakata deities, daughters of the storm god Susanoo, presiding over the sea and over safe passage across it. A place of worship is traditionally said to have stood here from the late sixth century, but the buildings that give Itsukushima its present form belong to a later age. In the twelfth century the warrior-statesman Taira no Kiyomori, then the dominant power at the imperial court, took the shrine under his patronage and rebuilt it on a grand scale in the elegant shinden style of aristocratic mansions. Later fires and storms forced repeated reconstruction, so that the standing structures are largely medieval and early-modern work faithful to that twelfth-century plan rather than original to it.

In Shinto understanding the island is itself a kami, a holy presence, and its sanctity was once guarded by strict prohibitions: for centuries there were to be no births and no deaths on Miyajima, the dying and the heavily pregnant being carried to the mainland, and the felling of trees was forbidden. Such taboos express a conception of purity in which the sacred and the ordinary processes of the body are kept carefully apart. Pilgrims approached by boat, passing beneath the offshore torii, and the shrine’s seasonal rites included performances of bugaku, the courtly masked dance Kiyomori’s circle had brought from the capital.

Scholarship places Itsukushima within the wider history of Japanese sacred geography, where particular mountains, islands, and groves were marked off as the dwellings of the gods, and within the medieval fusion of Shinto with Buddhism, traces of which the precinct still carries. The shrine was recognised as a World Heritage site in 1996, and the torii rising from the water has become one of the most reproduced images of Japan. The reflex it draws on is older than its fame: a threshold set where the land gives way to the sea, marking the line past which the island belongs to the gods.