Itsukushima Shrine

The shrine is dedicated to three goddesses – Ichikishimahime and her sisters Tagorihime and Tagitsuhime – deities of the sea and of safe passage across it, long revered as protectors of shipping and the state. Tradition places its founding in 593, the year Empress Suiko took the throne, when a local chieftain named Saeki no Kuramoto received a divine command to build a shrine on the island. Guided, the story goes, by a sacred crow, he chose the spot where the tide runs in and out and raised the halls there.

The island of Miyajima was itself considered a god – sacred enough that people were long reluctant to disturb its soil. Building the shrine over the water rather than on the land was, in part, a way of honouring that: the shrine stands in the sea because the island itself was holy.

The shrine owes its present grandeur to Taira no Kiyomori, the warlord who dominated late-Heian Japan. As governor of Aki Province he took Itsukushima as his clan's tutelary shrine, and in 1168 rebuilt it in the elegant shinden style of aristocratic palace architecture – the layout of linked halls and long covered corridors that survives today. As Kiyomori's power grew, so did the shrine's prestige: retired emperors made pilgrimages here, and with them came the art and culture of the imperial capital.

That devotion outlasted the Taira. Through the shift to Minamoto rule and on into the Muromachi and Sengoku periods, successive warlords – the Ashikaga, the Ouchi, the Mori – continued to patronise and protect the shrine.

The complex is designed to be walked as a circuit, along corridors that thread between the main sanctuary and a series of smaller halls, all raised on pillars above the tidal flat. At its heart is the main hall; out in front, a broad open stage projects toward the sea, used for court dance and, nearby, Noh theatre performed on a stage of its own – one of very few built over water anywhere in Japan.

Much of the complex is designated National Treasure or Important Cultural Property, including the main halls, the two great corridors, and freestanding structures dotting the island – a five-storey pagoda of 1407, a later two-storey pagoda, and the vast Senjokaku hall begun by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Itsukushima is one of the Three Views of Japan, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996.

The centrepiece, though, remains the great torii standing out in the water. The experience changes entirely with the tide: at high water the gate and shrine appear to float, while at low tide the sea retreats far enough to walk out across the sand to the base of the torii and stand beneath it.