Encountering Matsue & Izumo: A photo-essay

By Mark Lalor, Limelight Arts Travel’s Senior Product Manager

After accompanying Limelight Arts Travel’s recent tour to Kyoto and Tokyo, Senior Product Manager Mark Lalor spent a few days exploring Izumo and Matsue, off the beaten track in Shimane Prefecture on the Sea of Japan. In this photo essay, he describes his visit to a lesser-known but rich destination that is included on our upcoming tour of archaeology and ancient history in the south of Japan.

Izumo and nearby Matsue are rich in archaeology, history and culture, but in all the years I lived, worked and travelled in Japan, I had never visited before. As I discovered, the region offers a wonderful insight into Japan’s mythological origins, history and archaeology.

My inspection trip took me to the ancient shrines, temples, museums and unique ‘garden’ of the Adachi Museum of Art in Matsue, and introduced me to the fascinating adventures of nineteenth-century Greek/Irish writer and translator, Lafcadio Hearn, in southern Japan.

Map of southern Japan, showing the central north in detail, on the Sea of Japan coast between the archipelago and Korea on mainland Asia.

Mythology and creation

I began with a visit to Izumo. Surrounded by sacred mountains and the sea, this small country town is home to Izumo Taisha, one of the most important shrines in the country and central to Japan’s creation mythology. It’s here that all the Shinto deities gather each October for the Kamiari festival.

Shinto priests gather at the seashore, welcoming the gods onto land, and escorting them to the shrine. Despite the large crowds that gather to witness the procession of the gods, the ceremony unfolds in a respectful silence, with the priests’ loud cry of “Otachi!” the only loud noise punctuating the ritual to announce the moment when the gods leave the shrine again.

Izumo Shrine is reached by a pine tree-lined path, leading to the worship hall adorned with a huge sacred rope (shimenawa). This huge straw rope is characteristic of temples in the Izumo region, but the one at this shrine is particularly special: at 3.5 metres in length, it is eight metres in diameter at its thickest part and weighs five tons!

The main hall is surrounded by fences, marking the inner sanctuaries as inaccessible to the uninitiated, adding an extra air of the mystery to the mythology of the shrine. The wooden buildings are unadorned with paint or decoration, built in a sober Japanese architectural style that predates Buddhism and offers a sense of serenity and reverence that feels much older.

Above, Izumo Shrine and its extraordinary straw rope, weighing five tons!

Archaeology & ancient history

A visit to the excellent Shimane Museum of Ancient Izumo next to the shrine adds an illuminating context to the visit, showcasing local history and archaeology. The museum explores the spiritual traditions of ancient Izumo, from pre-historic times to the construction of the shrine.

There are explanations of daily life at that time and interesting exhibits on the sacred origins of Sumo. I found the sixth-century clay figurines, bronze swords and bells particularly striking, while the corridor of myth and legends explained the creation stories that underpin so much of Japanese history and ritual – even today – but which can be less familiar to international visitors.

The architecture of this museum is fascinating: like the shrine, it’s surrounded by a fence that echoes the idea of a sacred perimeter, and the steel of Fumihiko Maki’s design showcases an important regional product.

Of course, while in Izumo I also made sure to try the local sake and soba (buckwheat) noodles – two gastronomic specialties for which the region is known throughout Japan!

Izumo is famous for its buckwheat noodles, or “soba”, prized for a nutty flavour thanks to the use of the whole seed in making the ‘flour’. A tasty dipping sauce is used for flavouring the noodles, which diners are invited to drink at the end of the meal. It’s usual to eat three small bowls of different types of soba in Izumo, but true gastronomes will order up to six different bowls!

art, garden, or both?

While in Matsue, I was delighted to visit the Adachi Museum of Art. It was founded by Zenko Adachi, a local businessman whose passion for garden design formed his view that Japanese gardens should be viewed as living paintings.

The museum realises this in a unique way, as you move through the garden from inside the museum building, admiring the award-winning garden panorama. This is one of the most celebrated examples of “borrowed scenery” gardens in the world, incorporating the features of the distance landscape into the tightly clipped and shaped azalea bushes, unfolding like a masterly scroll through the different rooms.

Really, the garden is the most significant work of art here, and it’s been voted the best garden in Japan every year since 2003! Turning away to the interior galleries reveals a fine collection of Nihonga works, modern Japanese paintings in a Western style, as well as ceramics by Mingei (or folk art) master Kawai Kanjiro.

Not far from Matsue is another celebrated garden – not as famous as the Adachi Museum of Art, but equally beautiful in a different way. On the evocatively named Daikon (or radish) Island on Lake Nakaumi is Yushien Garden.

It’s renowned for its collection of bright and highly-scented peony roses. There are indoor and outdoor displays all year, but spring is the best time to visit and I was there in early December. While I gave it a miss, it will be a spectacular inclusion on Ben Churcher’s tour in May.

The Adachi Museum of Art, with the world’s most famous “borrowed scenery” garden. In this museum, the garden is the primary artwork - but there are also paintings and ceramics to admire in addition to the controlled example of sophisticated Japanese garden design.

the fascinating lafcadio hearn

Although Matsue and Izumo are less known to international visitors, they do have a reputation around the world for being a cradle of Japanese spirituality – and for the supernatural. This idea of Matsue was popularised in the nineteenth century by Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-born writer, translator and teacher whose books did much to introduce Japan to a curious West.

While in Matsue, I visited the Lafcadio Hearn Museum and Residence. Located in the shadow of Matsue’s castle, it introduces the fascinating story of Hearn, a polymath whose restless life and varied skill set took him from Greece to Ireland and on to the USA. After his formative globe-trotting years, Hearn arrived in Japan. He scraped together a living teaching the Western curriculum, and settled very happily in Matsue for a year.

Here, he married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a local high-ranking samurai family, and he was one of the first Westerners to become a Japanese citizen, adopting the name Koizumi Yakumo. During his time in Matsue, Hearn spoke to locals about the origin legends of Izumo and other locations, writing down their “ghost stories” and translating their haiku. As he published these collections in English, he created the first popular and perhaps most enduring images of modern Japan in the West.

Hearn reluctantly moved from his beloved house in Matsue, heading to Kumamoto in search of work. (We visit this city too on Ben’s tour, in order to survey the sites of the so-called “Hidden Christians”). But Hearn’s descriptions of the house and garden, now available in Tuttle’s publication Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan, and a visit to his former residence in Matsue, offer a sense of daily life and ancient traditions in the tranquil Shimane region of Matsue and Izumo.

Above, a view onto Lafcadio Hearn’s small garden in Matsue. He loved his garden deeply and wrote a beautiful description of it, now published in the book “Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan” (photo: Yasuhiro S, Flickr, CC BY SA 2.0)

When designing our tour Osaka to Nagasaki for archaeologist Ben Churcher, a real Japanophile, to lead, I was struck again by the range of archaeological sites, temples and shrines, collections of art and fascinating smaller house museums and gardens that can be found beyond the well-worn tourist triangle of Kanazawa, Kyoto and Hiroshima.

Japan is such a culturally rich destination, and it really rewards return journeys. In Matsue and Izumo, I felt that I got closer to Japan’s ancient spiritual traditions than I had anywhere else in the country, and the world-class garden of the Adachi Museum of Art and Lafcadio Hearn’s house and garden offered an additional perspective on how those traditions have continued to inform Japanese culture today.

Many of Japan’s castles, a reminder of its feudal government under the shoguns, were damaged during World War II and have been rebuilt. Matsue Castle, above, is one of the best preserved and most authentic.