Itsukushima
— — the gate the tide forgets, then remembers.
Not only on a wall.
“A small wooded island in Japan's Seto Inland Sea, half an hour by ferry from Hiroshima. Its shrine has stood at the waterline since the twelfth century, and at high tide the vermilion torii appears to float free of the shore. Deer wander the path to the rope-walked steps. The tide goes out, and the gate is suddenly something you can walk to.
Itsukushima, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Itsukushima, also called Miyajima, is an island of about thirty square kilometres in Hiroshima Bay, part of Setonaikai National Park. Itsukushima Shrine, dedicated to the three daughters of the storm god Susanoo, was founded in the sixth century and rebuilt in its current waterborne form by Taira no Kiyomori in 1168. UNESCO inscribed the shrine and its surrounding forest as a World Heritage Site in 1996. The island's highest point, Mount Misen, rises 535 metres above the bay and is the source of a sacred flame said to have burned for over a thousand years.
The great torii stands roughly 200 metres offshore on tidal flats. At high tide it reads as floating; at low tide visitors walk out to its cypress legs across damp sand. Tides in Hiroshima Bay swing about four metres on a spring tide, and the cycle runs twice a day. The current gate, the eighteenth in the shrine's history, was raised in 1875 from camphor wood. It reopened in December 2022 after a three-year structural restoration during which it was wrapped in white scaffolding visible across the bay.
The JR ferry from Miyajimaguchi takes ten minutes and runs every fifteen minutes during daylight. The shrine opens at six-thirty in the morning and closes around sunset; admission to the prayer hall is 300 yen. Free-ranging sika deer are protected and habituated to people, though feeding them is prohibited. Mount Misen can be climbed in about ninety minutes via the Momijidani trail, or reached by the Miyajima Ropeway, which opened in 1959 and was modernised in 2011. From November 2023 the island also collects a 100-yen visitor tax at the ferry terminal.