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Setonaikai NP, Kagawa
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
At Teshima Art Museum, the artwork is a living spring: Rei Naito’s piece gathers tiny beads of water inside Ryue Nishizawa’s pillar-free, 40-by-60-meter concrete shell, open to wind, light and birdsong.
Christian Boltanski’s 2010 artwork on Teshima stores heartbeats recorded around the world. Visitors can add their own heartbeat and a personal message, then search the archive and listen to others.
Shima Kitchen turned a vacant village house into a place where food and art meet. For its 2010 opening, Teshima women began cooking island ingredients with advice from chefs at Tokyo’s Marunouchi Hotel.
The stone torii at Ieura Hachiman Shrine dates to 1474 and is recognized as Kagawa Prefecture’s oldest stone torii. It is made from Teshima stone, linking the island’s shrine to its quarrying craft.
Local legend says the monk Kūkai dug into the ground to quench his thirst, and water appeared at Karato Spring. A 1929 stone waterworks still channels the spring through basins for different uses.
Teshima’s Odaishi-mairi links 33 sacred sites on the 21st day of the third lunar month. A local merchant established the small pilgrimage in 1833; in 1919, its stone shrines were spread around the island.
Halfway up Mt. Danyama, wind chimes ring with names of visitors’ loved ones written on hanging strips. New names can join Christian Boltanski’s 2016 artwork, making the forest’s memorial grow over time.
Quarried since the Kamakura period, Teshima’s soft, workable stone was shipped around Japan for lanterns. Examples are famed at Kyoto’s Katsura Imperial Villa and Nijō Castle, reminders of a once-important island trade.
After World War II, Teshima’s dairy farms helped earn it the name “Island of Milk.” In 1947, Yoshimura Shizue brought 8 orphaned children there, following social reformer Toyohiko Kagawa’s advice to seek milk.
Teshima’s Ieura and Karato Hachiman shrines each hold an autumn harvest festival with a taikodai, a drum platform weighing 1–2 tonnes. About 100 people carry one—a remarkable effort for a small island community.
After a 25-year dispute, a pollution settlement was reached in 2000. Kagawa Prefecture acknowledged that it had misclassified the waste and failed to supervise the operator, apologized to residents and agreed to remove the dump.
About 913,000 tonnes of waste and contaminated soil were removed from Teshima and processed on neighboring Naoshima—not on Teshima. By March 2023, the treatment facilities were removed and the site leveled.
