Art Island Naoshima

For my 30th birthday, we went on an overnight trip to the island of Naoshima just a few hours west of Miki. It is technically a part of Kagawa Prefecture, part of the larger island of Shikoku, although it is actually closer to Okayama, Hyogo's neighboring prefecture.

Until the late-80s, Naoshima was little more than a fishing village with a Mitsubishi Materials refinery. At that time, Benesse Corporation, one of the largest private education companies in Japan, began buying land to establish several contemporary art museums. Today it is known as the art island in Japan along with two other nearby islands that also have Benesse installations.

We visited the three main museums: Chichu Art Museum, Benese House Museum, and Lee Ufan Museum. All three were built by Tadao Ando, who is considered to be Japan's premier modern architect, famous for his use of minimalist concrete. 

Each museum was spacious and airy with a very limited selection of artwork on display. The Benesse museums aren't about going to a building to a see a lot of art. They're about an experience in which the viewer enjoys just several masterpieces being perfectly displayed within Tadao's buildings, just as a master sushi chef presents several pieces of sashimi on a gleaming, white platter. 

On Naoshima, Tadao was given complete control to achive one of his principle goals of building architecture that achieves harmony with the nature around it. And in that spirit, the whole island of Naoshima has an interesting blend of nature, art and architecture. It has a pleasing balance of old and new, and the Benesse Art Sites, while dramatic, aren't so overpowering that a visitor isn't aware that Naoshima was historically a fishing town and still is to this day.

During the three-hour journey to Naoshima, we made a brief stop in Okayama City. While in Tokyo during Golden Week, we discovered a chocalte stout made by the Miyashita Sake Brewery. I checked online and found that the brewerey has been making sake for nearly 100 years, while their beer operation was only recently developed in 1995. Even though they haven't been brewing beer for that long, they have developed a robust catalog of craft beers with several award winners. We procurred some more chocolate stout, as well as their dunkel, rice lager, and sakura beer. All were excellent.

Uno port is about 30 minutes south of Okayama City, and from there it is just a 20 minute ferry ride to Naoshima. 

As you approach the island, you are greeted by a red pumpkin designed by Yayoi Kusama, one of Japan's most famous modern artists whose work we saw exhibited in Osaka in March. Beyond the modern visitors center, the island is dominated by the Benesse museums and hotel, with numerous inns and cafes in-between. 

For lunch we visited Shioya Diner, a fun cafe with an interor covered in 1950s American kitsch. We ate "taco rice," a dish originally conceived in Okinawa and inspired by the Mexican food U.S. Marines were eating. It's basically all the ingredients of a taco eaten on top of a bed of rice instead of in a taco shell. The owner of Shioya, whose nickname we learned was Buddy, was very excited to find out I was from Chicago. He said he had been there 30 or 40 times to buy products for a 1950s vintage store he used to own in Tokyo. He further explained that he still had products in a storage unit in Elk Grove, IL, which happens to be where my mother grew up and where I was born! We had a great time talking about local sights in suburban Chicago.

After visiting Chichu and Benesse House, we went to I Love Yu (in this case "yu" means hot water in Japanese), a funky bath house owned by Benesse.

We ended out night at the inn were staying at and barbequed for dinner. The rooms at Minshuku Yokombo weren't anything special, but the inn had a great Japanese garden and it was right on the beach. We went swimming at night and were delighted to see the water filled with bioluminsent plankton, a sight I saw once before in the sea of Japan. It was only thanks to Buddy at Shioya Diner that we knew that it was peak season for the glow-in-the-dark sea creatures. 

The next day we visited Lee Ufan Museum and checked out the south side of the island, which has a great beach that was covered in happy visitors. The beach offers Mongolian Yurts as a fun loding option for tourists, but perhaps not in the summer heat. There is also another Yayoi Kusama pumpkin and lots more happy art nearby.

The Honmura neighborhood in the center of the island has lots of old houses including the Art House Project, another cluster of Benesse museums that we weren't able to visit on this trip. We did make a stop at Naoshima's only cat cafe, called Nyaoshima (Meow-shima).

Naoshima really was a magical place. We want to visit again during a different season and maybe go to the other Bennese islands as well. It's pretty far out of the way if Tokyo is your only stop in Japan, but for anyone living in or visiting the Kansai region, it's worth making the trip to see some amazing art on a special island. 

Suzurandai Hike

Miki sits just north of the western end of Mt. Rokko, which is actually a range of mountains on the north side of Kobe. I have gone hiking on various parts of the Rokko range, my most favorite being the trails near Ashiyagawa Station, close to the Frank Lloyd Wright house there.

The best way to start a hike: Mr. Donuts.

Suzurandai Station is a 25 minute train ride from Miki, and I found out about some trails that go from there all the way to downtown Kobe. The trail that we chose lasted four hours and brought us over two different Rokko peaks. The amount of steps we hiked up and down was incredible. Becky and I are both in much better shape than when we arrived in Japan almost three months ago, but we struggled to get up the longest stretch of steps. We were embarrassed to see all the old people making the same journey, some seemingly struggling less than us. Hiking is largely considered an old person’s past time in Japan, and I would say at least 70% of our fellow hikers were retirees.

Toward the end of the hike, we met a nice Japanese man who asked us if we wanted to see some old growth forests. We kindly went with him, which was enjoyable, but which took us off of our intended path down the mountain. We ended up going down a trail that was not well traveled or maintained. The spiderwebs everywhere were annoying, and the amount of dead leaves and branches covering the steep trail was a little dangerous, but we finally made it down.

The trail ended in a drab cement park in Kitano, a neighborhood north of Sannomiya, downtown Kobe. Kitano is where many westerners settled when Kobe was opened to the west in the 19th century, so there are a number of historical homes there. Most of them cost about $7 to enter, so I have not known many westerners who have paid admission to tour western mansions in Japan. The neighborhood itself is very nice and is one of Kobe’s most upscale. One of the many historical houses that was destroyed in the Great Hanshin earthquake in 1995 was later rebuilt and is now home to one of the coolest Starbuck’s we’ve ever been to.