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Published: October 22nd 2014
Up bright and early to shovel as much onigiri and other breakfast goodies as possible into us before our short journey outside Hiroshima city. As we were travelling across the city on the Hiroden (tram) towards Hiroden Nishi-Hiroshima terminus, Neil commented about the houses built into the hillsides he could see. Sadly, just over a month later, Hiroshima was hit with heavy rains and some of those houses we had seen had been destroyed by landslides. The day we were visiting Miyajima Island, however, was the hottest of 2014 and the heat was almost unbearable at 39 degrees!
Officially, the island is actually named Itsukushima but because the island is so closely related to its key shrine (Itsukushima), it’s nickname is Miyajima which is Japanese for ‘shrine island’ and that’s what it’s more commonly known as. It was very easy to get to, a simple tram ride, switch to a train to Miyajima-guchi port and then a ferry to the island. However, this didn’t stop Donna getting things completely wrong and managing to convince Neil to get off the train 4 stops too early…oops! The good thing was we only had to pay for the tram ride because the rest
of the journey was free due to our Japan rail passes.
Miyajima has been considered a holy place for most of Japanese history and its own history is quite interesting. History says, in 806AD the mountain on Miyajima (Mount Misen) was established as an ascetic site for the Shingon Buddhist sect and in the years since the Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines on the island have maintained a close relationship. More fascinating is that in the past women were not allowed on the island at all and old people were taken from the island to die and now women are not allowed to give birth; this is so that the ritual purity of the island is preserved. In 1996 part of the island achieved World Heritage Status (the Torii Gate, Itsukushima Shrine and the Mt Misen Forest).
Miyajima has a single, small town which has strict measures applied to ensure it retains a classically Japanese Edo-era look and feel. Part of the charm of Miyajima town is Omotesando Street, a lovely covered shopping street which has lots of food and tourist nick-nack shops which leads to a seafront promenade and the amazing ‘floating’ torii gate. All around Omotesando
Street and the promenade, deers wander around freely. Although wild they are very inquisitive and humans don’t seem to scare them at all and they are very curious about everything. We were warned to keep our JR Passes in our bags as the deers have a bit of a taste for them and several times they have been caught chowing down on tourists passes! 😊. A feeding ban is now actually in place for these deers, so they seem to eat whatever they can steal from the tourists.
The first thing we did on our walk through Omotesando Street (apart from giggle at the ‘deer poop’ ice cream) was stop at a shop selling the famous momiji manju cakes (もみじ饅頭). These small cakes are made in the shape of a maple leaf and cost around ¥80 (45p) per cake. Traditionally, they are made with a sweet bean paste filling but other flavours have sprung up, after browsing the flavours and not fancying cheese flavour, we opted for a custard filling and it was lovely! Momiji manju are sold all over Hiroshima prefecture, but Miyajima is especially famous for them, so they are very fresh. There are lots of shops
where you can see them being made with a mixture of hand and machine labour!
Walking down the street we made mental notes of the shops we wanted to go back to and took a leaf out of the deers books by popping in and out of the shops air con to cool down. A couple of times we actually had to step over the deer who were sprawled in the entrance to the shops and restaurants staying cool!
The sea promenade was really nice, it wasn’t too busy and there were lots of light towers along the way, which we imagine at night when they were lit it would look very pretty. We got very excited at our first glimpse of the huge torii gate, we had specifically checked the times of the tides so we made sure we saw it both ways - ‘floating’ in the water and when the tide was out.
The floating torii is the gate to Itsukushima Shrine and it is stunning when the tide is in, really amazing and it took our breath away. We spent a reasonable amount of time taking photos of the gate, a few selfies 😉
and then were getting hot so decided as the tide has gone out a bit to walk across the sand, balancing on some rocks which resulted in some very wonky photos with Neil trying to balance and not fall off! We joined a deer sheltering from the sun under the trees and just took in the scenery. The blue sky with the abundance of trees (no trees are allowed to be cut down) and the red wood of the shrines made a gorgeous vista.
Itsukushima Shrine is a large, red-lacquered complex of halls and pathways on stilts and when the tide is in, the water is underneath the shrine. It was originally built so that ordinary people could visit the shrine without destroying the sanctity of the island! At ¥500 (£2.87) for entry we decided not to go in…it was packed and just gazed on it from the outside!
We had a wander around the village and the shops were very authentic Japanese wood style, there was a plethora of vending machines to top up our thermal flask and we even saw the cutest, smallest Coke delivery van parked…the Japanese are the best at making their delivery trucks
cute! We wandered completely the wrong way looking for another shrine and ended up at an aquarium, we headed inside, pretending to debate whether we wanted to pay to go in and lingered in the reception area to cool off in the air con 😉. After cooling off we retraced our steps, found the shrine at the top of a rather steep hill the road to it was bathed in the blazing hot sun and so we decided it was too hot to walk to it!
The next thing on our list was a huge disappointment. We wanted to go up the Mount Misen ropeway and we weren’t going to hike it in the heat, so we caught the free shuttle bus to the ropeway station. The problem is, beforehand we couldn’t find out the price of the ropeway, but having experienced the one on our Mount Fuji day trip we thought it would be maybe ¥400 (£2.29) each. Nowhere at the shuttle bus stop or anywhere else on the island advertised the price either, which we found quite strange. It all became clear when we got to the ropeway station and saw the price was ¥1800 each! Yikes,
that’s £10.34…we just couldn’t justify paying that for a cable car ride so legged it back to the shuttle bus about to leave to go back to the town.
A very odd fact is that Miyajima is famous for its rice scoops (杓子 shakushi), specifically the wooden spatula style used to serve rice. The world’s largest spatula is on display along Omotesando Street and amazingly we managed to walk right past it without seeing it on our first walk along the street!
Food Kit Kats Ever since our day trip to Fuji, we were kicking ourselves that we hadn’t bought the flavoured kit kats. We had been hunting in every shop since and we finally found citrus flavoured kit kats on Miyajima. We snapped them up and rather than them being covered in chocolate, they had an intense citrus flavoured coating, like white chocolate but not as sweet. They were absolutely delicious!
Okonomiyaki On our first night in Hiroshima, as we said in our last blog, we ended up eating at an Italian, mainly because the okonomiyaki restaurant we wanted to eat at turned us away. Donna was seriously disappointed, so Neil made it
his mission to find a BETTER okonomiyaki place. Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き) is a Japanese savoury pancake which contains a variety of different ingredients and it’s mainly associated with the Hiroshima (and Kansai) area of Japan, so where better to try it?! The name means
okonomi, or "what you like"/"what you want", and
yaki meaning "grilled" or "cooked". In Hiroshima, the ingredients are layered together and are typically batter, cabbage, pork (you can have squid, octopus and cheese as well) but we just opted for a traditional pork. Donna had udon noodles (thick) and Neil had soba noodles (thin) as one of the layers.
The place that Neil has so carefully researched and found was the perfect place for us to try okonomiyaki – it was
Okonomi-mura (お好み村, literally. "Okonomiyaki Village"). Apparently, it is the top ‘food theme park’ destination for families in Japan to visit! Okonomi-mura has 26 okonomiyaki restaurants, each has a slightly different style and set of ingredients, all the restaurants use a speciality okonomiyaki sauce which was specially created for Okonomi-mura by Sun Foods! As we started to wander around we studiously avoided the restaurants which had other foreigners eating in them and opted for a little
place which had some Japanese guys eating there who gave us the thumbs up. The old couple who owned the restaurant were lovely and helped us choose what we wanted and we sat and watched completely fascinated while our food was prepared.
We have to say that okonomiyaki was a real food highlight of our Japan trip, it was very filling though and both of us struggled to finish! Watch the video below of the restaurant, half of it’s the wrong way because Neil was still getting to grips with our new phone 😉.
Oysters Miyajima island is famous for it's oysters and most of Japan's oysters come from the waters around Miyajima. Donna tried her first ever oyster for an unbelievably cheap ¥200 (£1.14) and it was amazing. She opted for a baked oyster, where the guy running the stall put lemon juice in the open oyster shell and baked it on a charcoal grill.
Potato wedges…again We have to mention it again, what is it with the Japanese fascination with potato wedges? Not that we mind and it was a delight having potato wedges for breakfast at the hotel but we do wonder
why the Japanese love them so much!
Alcohol With our okonomiyaki meal, Donna chose a cold sake and it was both our first try of sake and wow, it was amazing! Unbelievably smooth and not harsh at all considering you are drinking a spirit straight…we’ll have a lot more about sake in our next blog! Neil opted for Kirin, which is another of the big brand beers in Japan (apart from Asahi) and we both agreed that Kirin is the better beer by far!
Observations Technology capital…Japan? Nope, not really! Seriously, we had this image in our mind that Japan was super high-tech with modern everything. The reality was actually a little disappointing. Japan isn’t as techie as we thought it would be and there was hardly any free wifi anywhere and there are very strict restrictions in place regarding non-residents buying sim cards.
These restrictions mean that non-resident of Japan can't purchase a sim card, you have to have residency to do this. So some enterprising companies have got around this by hiring out ‘pocket wifi’ with included daily internet data. This is what we did and we can wholeheartedly recommend the company
we did it through –
Global Advanced Communications. They had the pocket wifi waiting for us at our first hotel in Tokyo and provided a return envelope for us to post it back at the airport when we were leaving. The excellent thing about these pocket wifi devices is that you can just put it in your bag and carry it around with you all day and connect to Google Maps whenever you need to. Which leads us onto another top tip, Google Maps is amazing for Japan and finding your way around. Without it we would have got completely lost and it saved us quite a few times!
Hotels are so trusting It’s unbelievable how trusting hotels are in Japan, no deposits necessary they give you a load of toiletries and free to use stuff in your rooms and don’t even check the room when you check out of the hotel! It’s was so nice not to have to worry about hotels trying to scam us on the minibar and we noticed that a lot of Japanese society does work on trust, which says a great deal about the Japanese character and people.
All hotels also have laundry
facilities, the most expensive we used was ¥100 (57p!) per wash and ¥100 per dry, a lot of the laundry facilities were free. This means when travelling around Japan you can pack light and just make use of the self-service laundry. We wish every hotel in the world would have laundry facilities like this!
Women, men…in lifts and seats on trains An observation we made on several occasions is that Japanese women are very wary and most will only get into a lift if another woman is in there. On a couple of occasions, we saw Japanese women wait for the next lift rather than be in it with a man alone. The same went with sitting next to men on trains, we observed women mostly sitting next to each other or standing if the only seat available was next to a man.
Our next stop is a very European and unusual city…
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Andrea
I love your Japan blogs, they are absolutely fascinating! I've heard about the deer and how trusting Japanese culture is. I'm a little wary of traveling there by myself, but your observations make it sound ok.