The boat leaves the small pier at Matsushima in the early morning and moves out into the bay. Within minutes the mainland disappears behind the first ring of islands, and the water becomes a maze.
This is Matsushima: two hundred and sixty islands in a shallow bay on the Pacific coast of Miyagi Prefecture. The islands are small — some barely large enough to hold a single tree — and every one is covered in Japanese black pine, the trees shaped by the sea wind into forms that look deliberate, like bonsai at landscape scale.
Japan has a tradition called sankeimono — the three great views — and Matsushima is one of them. The other two are Amanohashidate on the Japan Sea coast, where a long sandbar crosses a bay, and Miyajima in Hiroshima Prefecture, where a vermilion gate stands in the sea. The designation is old. The views have been worth making a journey to see for six hundred years.
The poem Bashō couldn't write
In the summer of 1689, a poet named Matsuo Bashō arrived at Matsushima after weeks of walking north from Edo. His journey — documented in the prose-and-haiku travel account Oku no Hosomichi — had already produced some of his finest work. At Matsushima, he was reportedly so moved that he wrote almost nothing.
The haiku most frequently attributed to Bashō at Matsushima — Matsushima ya / Matsushima ya / Matsushima ya (Matsushima, ah / Matsushima, ah / Matsushima, ah) — is almost certainly not his. The attribution appeared long after his death. But the story of the poem — of a great poet arriving at a great view and finding that language was insufficient — has become as famous as the place itself.
There is something honest in that failure. Matsushima is one of those landscapes that resists being described. From the boat, moving between the islands in grey morning light, the question of what to say about it — whether it is beautiful, whether it is moving — begins to seem like the wrong question.
The islands
The islands were formed when rising sea levels after the last ice age drowned a system of hills and valleys. What had been hilltops became islands; what had been valleys became the channels between them. The pines on each island are not planted. They are simply what grows on thin, rocky soil in a place with strong sea winds and salt spray.
The pines have been growing here for a very long time, and the wind has had a very long time to work with them. By now each tree has a particular form — horizontal, wind-bent, leaning inland — and from the boat the islands look like a collection of ink brushstrokes, each one a slightly different idea of the same thing.
The light on a grey November morning does something particular to the bay. The water is the same colour as the sky, and the islands float between them without clear boundaries. The pine trees, dark green, are the only things that register as solid. The effect is exactly what Japanese painters aimed for in the monochrome ink landscapes of the fourteenth century: the world rendered as gradations of grey with a few firm strokes of black.
Zuiganji
The approach to Zuiganji temple runs between very old cedars alongside a soft cliff face. Into the cliff, monks have carved a long row of niches and small cave rooms — spaces used for meditation and for placing stone figures of Jizō, the bodhisattva who guards travelers and children. The niches are worn and mossy. Some hold candles or fresh flowers; others have been empty for centuries.
The temple itself was rebuilt in 1609 by Date Masamune, the lord who unified northern Japan, and its interiors are covered in gold-leaf screen paintings — cranes, pines, cherry blossoms — that are entirely unlike the austerity of the approach. This contrast is not accidental. The gate screens are designed to surprise. The interior is deliberately excessive, which gives the restraint of the cedar path greater force in memory.
Date Masamune is everywhere in Matsushima: on signboards, on statues, in the temple's design. He understood that Matsushima was one of the most meaningful places in Japan and spent accordingly. The result is a place with many layers of time sitting on top of each other — the original landscape, centuries of pilgrimage, the seventeenth-century rebuilding, and the twenty-first-century tourist boats.
The wave
On 11 March 2011, a tsunami generated by the Tōhoku earthquake reached the coast of Miyagi Prefecture. The wave was enormous — in some places over fifteen metres high. The city of Matsushima is on the shore of the bay.
The islands protected it. Two hundred and sixty islands, each covered in a dense stand of pine trees, absorbed and deflected the force of the wave as it entered the bay. Matsushima suffered flooding and damage; other coastal towns nearby were devastated.
This is not something the islands were placed here to do. They are here because of a particular combination of geology and sea level. But the fact that the same landscape that has been called beautiful for six hundred years also functioned, once, as a breakwater — that the pines that Bashō could not find words for stood in the water and took the wave — is not something you can forget once you know it. It adds a quality to the view that the view did not ask for.
What remains
The Japanese aesthetic term that most accurately describes Matsushima is not yūgen, though yūgen is present in the grey morning light and the ink-wash islands. It is sabi — the beauty conferred by age, weathering, and the passage of time. The bay looks as it does because of six hundred years of wind on pine. The cliff caves at Zuiganji look as they do because of water on stone and moss on stone and the accumulated attention of people who came here to sit quietly in them. The beauty is not separate from the time. It is made of it.
The last boat back leaves in the late afternoon. As it clears the final ring of islands and the mainland coast comes into view, the bay disappears behind you — two hundred and sixty islands folding back into a single dark line on the horizon. The silence you carry back is the particular kind that comes from spending time in a place that was here long before you arrived and will be here long after.