Koizu Inari Shrine & Sansha Shrine

 

At Koizu fishing port I headed over to see what seafood was being dried in the baskets, only to discover it was nets.

Koizu is, I think, the biggest port and fishing village so far along the Shimane Peninsula..

The road switchbacks up and out of the village. This is mostly a steep coastline.

I come to the familiar vermilion toriis of an Inari Shrine....

The shrine itself consists of just a honden..... bigger than in a roadside shrine, but smaller than a main shrine.

There does seem to be a kind of meeting hall though....

The 2d white fox on one of the torii is interesting.... don't remember seeing that anywhere else...

A little further up the road is the entrance to Sansha Shrine. The two shrines are adjacent so the Inari shrine may officially be a sub-shrine of Sansha....

I can find no information about the shrines history...

The Sansha Shrine is a little more substantial.

It is believed that this is the Suijin Shrine listed in the Izumo Fudoki. Later it became known as Sansha Daimyojin.

The main kami are the three Sumiyoshi kami, Uwatsutsu, Nakatsutsu, and Sokotsutsu.

This secondary shrine is an Umisachi Shrine.

These sub-shrines are Toshitokujin, and then a Miho Shrine with a Kinoyama Shrine...

The previous post was on the washboard rock coastline leading into Koizu.

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Lower Sagi Toriimoto Historic Preservation District

 

Sagi Toriimoto is an Historic Preservation District in Arashiyama, near Kyoto

In an earlier post, I covered the upper section, a group of thatched, 400 year old buildings, a couple of which still operate as eateries.

This section is more visited and includes plenty of retail establishments as well as private houses.

One of the old houses is open as a kind of free museum about the district.

The Sagi Toriimoto Town Conservation Museum is in a row of traditional machiya townhouses.

The exterior has a facade of lattices and mullioned windows.

The interior has raised tatami floors and some Meiji-era features including a coal-burning kitchen and interior water well.

The building dates back to the early Meiji Period and was renovated in 1993.

There are historic maps, photos, and architectural diagrams of the area.

A diorama shows how the area looked in 1930.

The previous post in this series on Arashiyama was on the upper section of Sagi Toriimoto.

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Koizu Coast Washboard Rocks

 

After leaving Mitsu Shrine, the road carries on down the narrow valley into the fishing village of Mitsu itself.

As with all small fishing harbours, huge concrete seawalls and breakwaters create a safe harbour for a handful of small inshore boats...

The peninsula is part of a large Japanese Geopark and so there are plenty of signs about the geology of the area.

Not much of a geologist myself, though I do prefer land that is bare of vegetation and do enjoy geologic "features" even if I don't fully understand them....

I do know that 10,000 years ago this peninsula was an island off the coast of what is now Izumo.

The road now hugs the sea until the first named feature called Ichinose.... what we would describe as washboard rocks....

Around the headland and we arrive at the main feature of this part of the coast, Koizu Coast Clothes Washing Rocks, more washboard formations....

I do know that the alternating stripes of rock are sandstone and mudstone, with the mudstone the hollow and the sandstone the raised....

In the winter the rocks are off limits because of the seaweed that grows here and is harvested later by the locals....

From the official website.... "This alternating layer of sandstone and mudstone is part of the Ushikiri Formation from the Miocene epoch of the Neogene period. Most of the sandstone in this layer is turbidite. However, the absence of complete boomer sequences suggests that the turbidite was deposited closer to its source. Groove marks on the lower surface of the sandstone layers indicate a southwest-northeast flow, and these, along with changes in lithology, suggest that sediments in this area may have been transported eastward."

It may be uncool or even un-eco, but concrete does have an aesthetic at times....

The previous post in this series on day 42 of my walk along the Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimage was on a couple of shrines just along the coast....

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