Floating Tori

One of the most famous scenes of Japan, found on every tourist brochure, is the Floating Tori of Miyajima, an island close to Hiroshima in the Inland Sea. The tori and the shrine that accompanies it are the subject of the final chapter of Donald Richie's book and comprise some of the last images in the documentary made about 1990 from the book, first published in 1971. Shinto shrines are bright orange and very cheery; they also surprise with their huge size, when the gates are immense, or with repetition, as in the 1000 Torii shrine in Kyoto, which takes an hour or more to walk through. I liked this particular shrine because it was on the water and you didn't have to climb up a mountain to see it. We took the ferry at dusk and by the time we arrived in Miyajima it was dark. The shrine was closed, but the tori was dramatically lit. It was low tide and you could walk out to its base, if you didn't mind getting muddy. We took a pass on that.