Okinoshima
— — an island the public no longer visits.
Not only on a wall.
“A small forested island, roughly 700 metres across, alone in the Genkai Sea between Kyushu and the Korean Peninsula. The whole island is the shrine. Okitsu-gu, the outer of the three Munakata Taisha shrines, sits among the cedars at its centre. For more than a millennium sailors left ritual offerings here on the route to the mainland. Women have never been permitted to land. Since 2018 men are no longer permitted either. The island is observed now from the sea, and from the mainland shrine that holds its name.
Okinoshima, 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.
Okinoshima lies in the Genkai Sea about 60 kilometres off the coast of Munakata, Fukuoka Prefecture, roughly midway between Kyushu and the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. The island is small, about 0.97 square kilometres, and rises to 244 metres. It is administered as part of Munakata City. The entire island is consecrated ground belonging to Munakata Taisha, the Shinto shrine complex on the mainland. Okitsu-gu, the outer of the three shrines that make up Munakata Taisha, stands among cedars near the island's centre. UNESCO inscribed the island and its associated mainland sites as World Heritage in 2017.
Between the fourth and ninth centuries, sailors crossing to the Korean Peninsula and Tang China left ritual offerings on Okinoshima — bronze mirrors, gilt-bronze horse fittings, glass beads, weapons. About 80,000 of these objects have been catalogued, and all of them are designated National Treasures of Japan. They were undisturbed for more than a thousand years because the island was, in practice, untouchable. Nothing is taken from it: not a leaf, not a stone, not a story. Visitors who entered historically were required to bathe naked in the sea before stepping ashore, and to speak of nothing they saw.
Okinoshima is closed to the public. Women have always been barred from landing, by long-standing Shinto custom. Until 2017 a small number of men — about 200 a year — could land for a single morning, 27 May, the festival commemorating the 1905 naval battle in the Tsushima Strait. Since 2018 the shrine has ended public landings entirely, citing conservation of the site. The closest the public comes is Munakata Taisha's Hetsu-gu on the mainland, where the spirit of Okinoshima is enshrined and where ferries from Konominato pass within sight of the island.