Nostalgic Citruses

Two weekends ago was the annual KCJS group trip to Miyajima and Hiroshima. Everyone in the program left on Friday and arrived on Miyajima later that morning for an exciting day of exploring Itsukushima Shrine and hiking to the top of the island. Miyajima is a small island in the Seto Inland Sea close to Hiroshima that has one of Japan’s most famous shrines, the floating Itsukushima Shrine. But seeing as how it was probably my 4th time there I’m gonna put that aside and focus on what happened after I left Miyajima on Saturday morning.

Instead of going to the Hiroshima Peace Museum for the upteenth time my friend and I decided to go take a ferry to some random island in the Seto Inland Sea that we found in the Lonely Planet guidebook. Departing from the group (with KCJS’s permission, of course) at the train station we took a train to the ferry port and boarded a 70’s themed ferry boat for Ikuchijima. After arriving and settling in, I explored the town to find Kozanji, an ostentatious temple/ theme park complex. Kozanji was founded by an Osaka steel magnate after he accumulated enough riches to turn from a worldly to a spiritual life and when his mother got sick. He built the complex as a bricolage of famous buildings from around Japan at a reduced scale and modified to suit his own tastes. I’ve uploaded a picture of a gaudyfied Tosho-gu from Nikko, which in its original state is considered one of the highest examples of Japanese Baroque in its exuberant and excessive decoration.


The souped up Japanese Baroque of the Tosho-gu shrine at Nikko recreated and enhanced at Kozan-ji on Ikuchijima

As I was racing around the theme-parked-themed temple engaging in one of Japan’s favourite pastimes, a stamp rally, I couldn’t help but feel that everything was familiar and that I had somehow been here before. Surely it was just the effect of a very successful replica of some other original building that I had previously visited. Yet, upon entering the last stamp rally station, I saw the unmistakably familiar sight of a white gate with two phoenixes perched on top. This was the exact same gate that I remember seeing the very first time I came to Japan in 2002 on a foreign exchange trip to Fukuyama. My high school friend, Matt Hecker, and I went with our host family to this place where I vaguely recall taking pictures of a large Kannon statue and passing this peculiar white gate with garish phoenixes. This experience is proof of my status as a Japanese neophyte eight years ago as I was completely ignorant of the significance of the buildings and their history until I saw them again on this trip. It was a pretty shocking experience to serendipitously run into a place I had been to before simply by randomly picking it from the Lonely Planet book because it looked like a quiet and relaxing island.


A view of the bridge between Ikuchijima and Innoshima. Note the citrus trees on the slope

The next morning my friend and I rented bicycles for ¥1500 and decided we would ride the 30 plus kilometers to the nearest train station. Our journey took us around Ikuchijima and through its verdant and luscious citrus slopes across a bridge to Innoshima. Innoshima was also full of citruses and we bought loads of them for only ¥800 and enjoyed a brief rest while sitting on a harbor break water. The cornucopia of citruses in this area is simply astounding and we bought a wide variety of tasty fruits. Whilst enjoying my anseikan my hand was suddenly raked by a plummeting brown mess of feathers. As I looked up and cradled my precious anseikan, I suddenly realized that the speeding feathery ball was actually a hawk that had swooped out of the sky and dive-bombed me in an attempt to steal what he probably thought was a tasty treat. I have no clue why he would be after a citrus fruit that could just as easily be found anywhere else on the island. After I recovered from the initial shock and chucked several projectiles in its direction, the hawk came back when I wasn’t looking and made another attempt to steal what was now the anseikan rind. I am still baffled by this bird’s behaviour, but after that it left me alone and I continued on my biking journey to Mukaishima. From Mukaishima, we took a ferry for ¥70 across the strait to the town of Onomichi, famous for its soy sauce ramen. When my stomach was sufficiently satiated I boarded a bullet train and made it back to Kyoto in time to finish my homework for the weekend.


CITRUSES!!! Anseikan, iyoukan, haruka, and hassaku in front of the Seto Inland Sea