Itsukushima

An island in the western Inland Sea, in the northwest of Hiroshima Bay, popularly known as Miyajima, Shrine Island, and named by Hayashi Gahō in 1643 as one of the Three Views of Japan. The Itsukushima Shrine is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the ground was held sacred long before the complex was built in 593, and in 1168 the warrior-courtier Taira no Kiyomori gave the shrine much of its present form. In the sixteenth century the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi raised the Senjō-kaku on the hill above it. Toyokuni Shrine and its five-storied pagoda stand here too.