Shodoshima Is Still One of Japan's Best Kept Island Secrets 

Islands can rapidly lose their appeal when they are connected to landmasses by bridges. This, mercifully, has not happened to Shodoshima, which still feels defiantly detached. Situated at the eastern extremity of the Inland Sea, Shodoshima is the largest of the countless landmasses in this bewitchingly beautiful inner waterway.

If painters have largely ignored the stunning aquatic scenery of these islands, writers have not. The American author, Donald Richie, devoted an entire book to the islands. Comparisons have often been made with the Greek Islands, where olive terraces face the sea, clove and lavender scent the air, and ripening orange groves luxuriate over hillsides, as they do on Shodoshma. 

An Inland Sea Answer to the Aegean 

But in contrast to the vernal purity of the Inland Sea's forested coastline, the islands of the Ionian and Aegean Sea are dry and parched, the occasional green and verdant patch of earth fed by springs, whose water sources are seldom reliable. Japan, on the other hand, benefits from an abundance of mountain water and subterranean aquifers.

The Greek allusions have been irresistible to Japanese authors, among them Yukio Mishima, who wrote an uncharacteristically romantic novel set on an island in the Inland Sea, titled The Sound of Waves. In Mishima's telling, the unabashed love story between a young fisherman and a female abalone diver could easily have been set on a Cycladic island. 

Smaller than Crete but larger than Amorgos or Astypalaia, Shodoshima only goes so far in supporting the Ionian analogy. Richie's classic travelogue, The Inland Sea, offers an appreciative but less sentimental account of the region, although he did find Shodoshima in the 1970s, when he visited, a place looking "very nineteenth century, like the scenes one used to see on plates and fans."

Pilgrims, Motorbikes and an Electric Bicycle 

While the nearby, far larger island of Shikoku is known for its eighty-eight-temple pilgrimage, Shodoshima has simplified both the number and the distances between temples to create its very own forty-eight-temple route. Navigating the island, you might come across devotees at these sacred spots, though the chances of spotting a traditional pilgrim clad in white, bearing an alms bowl, are rare. Even in Richie's day, he noted pilgrims on motorbikes.

After arriving in the pleasant port of Tonosho, where I based myself for the trip, I settled for something less motorized, but technologically aided: an electric bicycle. The island's circular road and any inland incursions can be hilly, with the electric bike providing a comfortable and time-saving boost.

Angel's Road and the Scent of the Sea 

It was almost noon by the time I checked in to my modest, sea-facing hotel and found a rental shop. Thirty minutes later, I was standing on the peak of a small hill looking down on Angel's Road, as it is known, a sandbar connected to three tiny islands. There is a wonderful offshore freshness along this coast that is absent in cities. Glimpses of salt-encrusted wooden homes, the ever-present smell of the ocean, the sails of distant fishing skiffs, and small shrines clinging only by the slimmest of perches to precipitous rock faces are reminders of how immensely important the sea has been in the lives of the islanders.

Kitsch Ruins Give Way to Century-Old Groves 

Almost everyone who visits the island drops into Olive Park, a pleasant, unabashedly kitsch hillside enterprise. Faux Grecian ruins and a windmill appear to be an attempt to associate this part of the island with the Mediterranean. It does have a well-established history of olive cultivation, though the first trees were planted around 1908, the island's sunny, well-aired slopes proving perfect for the fruit. 

Much as I liked strolling through the tunnels of trees, with glimpses of the indigo sea beyond, I turned away from the olive groves to the dark, briny smell of soy sauce, a far older, more authentic product of the island.

Inside a 150-Year-Old Soy Sauce Brewery 

The presence of soy followed me throughout much of the trip; its odor, somewhere between deep fermentation, roasted tea, and a long-standing, aromatic vinegar, was sensed well in advance of reaching the door of Yamaroku Shoyu, a 150-year old building tucked into a back street of a residential district in the east of the island.

Reeking of soy and miso, the darkened interior of the wooden factory, a family business, is a sight in itself. Climbing up a ladder to a dim, raftered space, a yeasty, slightly sweet, micro-biotic smell rises from sunken vats of fermented soy. Adding to the antique mood, at the rear of the premises are broad, 2-meter-high wooden vats known in Japanese as kioke. 

Yasuo Yamamoto, the fifth-generation head of the business, makes the barrels by hand, seasoning cedar slats, preparing bamboo pins, and strapping hoops in much the same way as traditional coopers once did. 

The painstaking process of fermenting soy in these barrels yields sauce varieties noticeably superior to those found in supermarkets. Their ponzu sauce, a mix of soy, bonito flakes, yuzu and tsudachi citrus juices, and sea tangle, the mix emitting a faint sea smell, has to be sampled to be believed. Shodoshima, in fact, is an island of pleasant, arresting smells. In late summer, clusters of fig trees emit a delicious aroma like coconut cream blended with herbs.

Turning south along Route 249, a road that follows the coast into a small peninsula, I stopped in my tracks, coming across a landscape strewn with body parts. A head, two feet. The giant blue and red objects turned out to be art installations, Shodoshima one of a number of Inland Sea islands associated with the Setouchi International Art Festival.

Twenty-Four-Eyes and the Ghost of Hideko Takamine 

Love is the color white. At least it is according to the blinding clarity of Bollard of Love, an art object standing on the key opposite the Nijushi no Hitomi Egamura at the extremity of the peninsula. 

The theme park is dedicated to the 1954 film Twenty-Four-Eyes, an unapologetically sentimental tale recounting the hardships of an impoverished school teacher and her twelve pupils living on the island. The film stars the legendary actress Hideko Takamine and is a film known to virtually every Japanese person, regardless of age.

A statue of the movie star, surrounded by her charges, stands in the park. There are a number of interesting retro buildings here, including a reconstructed schoolhouse, a museum dedicated to Tsuboi Sakai, author of the book on which the film is based, and the splendid Café Shinema Kurabu, a good lunch spot that doubles as a small museum of film trivia from the fifties and sixties.

Exiting the museum and consulting my map of the island, I realized I had only skimmed the surface of what Shodoshima had to offer. With plenty more to see, I would have to wait for another trip. I was happy not to have exhausted the island.

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Author: Stephen Mansfield