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Daisen-Oki NP, Shimane
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Exiled on Nakanoshima, Go-Toba kept revising the Shin Kokin Wakashū and exchanged letters with poet Fujiwara no Ietaka to hold a poetry contest across the sea. Nearly 800 poems survive from his island years.
Ama’s “Haruka” rock oysters take 2½ years to grow in open water. Sparse plankton slows them, but the clean offshore setting reduces norovirus and bacterial risks; fresh oysters are shipped only from March to May.
Nara-period wooden tags found at Heijō-kyō record dried abalone from Ama among tribute goods sent to the capital—evidence that Nakanoshima’s seafood reached the imperial court more than 1,200 years ago.
Nakanoshima is part of Dōzen’s volcanic rim: after a volcano’s summit collapsed, seawater filled the basin, leaving islands around a sheltered inner sea. The islands’ other shores face the open Sea of Japan.
Every grain of Ama-no-shio sea salt takes about a month to make, without machinery. Seawater trickles over bamboo frames in the sea breeze, then island firewood, a cypress draining trough and the sun finish the job.
One local account traces Kinnya-monya to Matsutaro Sugiyama, who returned from the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion with a half-remembered Kyushu tune and reshaped it into a weaving song. Today, dancers use wooden rice paddles.
In 1892, writer Lafcadio Hearn and his wife Setsu stayed 8 days in Hishiura, whose glassy bay he nicknamed Kagami-ga-ura (“Mirror Inlet”). He also wrote about village women at work and mothers’ lullabies.
Go-Toba was exiled to Nakanoshima in 1221, lived there for 19 years and was cremated on the island in 1239. Oki Shrine was completed in 1939, the 700th anniversary of his death.
Island tradition says villagers began ox-wrestling matches to cheer Go-Toba after he saw calves locking horns on the way to his residence. The custom eventually faded on Ama, by the end of the Meiji era.
At Akiya Coast, a heart-shaped opening was sculpted by wind and waves eroding porous volcanic rock over more than 1,000 years. The vivid red scoria around it formed about 2.8 million years ago.
Local myth says the goddess Hinamaji-no-Mikoto gave birth at Akiya Coast, and her childbirth tools turned to stone. The named rocks include Byōbu-iwa (“Screen Rock”) and Tarai-iwa (“Washbasin Rock”).
In 838, court poet Ono no Takamura was exiled to Kinkōji-yama on Nakanoshima after refusing a third mission to Tang China. Island accounts link his time there to a poem later selected as No. 11 in the Hyakunin Isshu.
