Inasa-no-Hama Beach was added to Your Favorites!
Daisen-Oki NP, Shimane
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
The Kojiki gives Inasa’s land-cession myth a spectacular opening: 2 divine envoys planted a long sword point-up in a wave and perched cross-legged on its tip before questioning Ōkuninushi. Local tradition places the meeting behind nearby Byōbu Rock.
On the 10th day of lunar month 10, priests light sacred fires and set out 2 temporary altars; a dragon-serpent deity guides the visiting kami inland to Izumo Taisha in a lantern-lit procession.
Dark bands beneath the pale sand are magnetite, concentrated by waves from sediment carried down during Edo-period iron-sand washing. This beach iron sand was once collected as a raw material for tatara ironmaking.
At celebrations in Izumo Taisha’s 2 hereditary priestly houses, villagers once flew a pair of kites marked with a crane and a turtle at Inasa-no-Hama. Artisans still handmake decorative versions, each taking 4–5 days.
For generations, local people have drawn seawater at Inasa-no-Hama on the first morning of each month, visited shrines, then used sasa leaves to sprinkle the water over their homes and families as purification.
Worshippers carry a little sand from Inasa-no-Hama to Soga Shrine at Izumo Taisha and offer it there; they then take home some of the shrine’s sand as a protective blessing. The beach is the ritual’s essential first stop.
Bentenjima once stood offshore. Port construction and offshore breakwaters helped expand the sand until the beach joined it by the late 1980s—so the round rock visitors can walk around was still an island within living memory.
Inasa was established as a bathing resort in 1888. In 1891, Lafcadio Hearn praised the bay and described a private bathhouse for Izumo Taisha’s head priest, marked by a torii and shimenawa, where the priest bathed robed.
The Izumo Fudoki describes a rock called Kadoishijima as 15 m tall, about 75 m around, and home to an eagle’s nest. The local Geopark identifies that old island with today’s Bentenjima.
Though called Bentenjima, the tiny shrine above the rock no longer enshrines Benzaiten: it did so during the age of shrine-Buddhist blending, but has honored Toyotamahime since the Meiji era.
South of the beach, the sand curves into Sono-no-Nagahama. In the Izumo Fudoki’s Kunibiki myth, this coast was the rope a giant deity used to haul distant land toward Izumo.
