Step out of Iwaya Port on Awaji’s northern tip and you will see it from the door — a small, gray-rocked islet rising perhaps twenty meters out of the sea, just a hundred metres offshore. It is called Eshima, “picture island,” named for its dramatic appearance against the Akashi Strait. And it is, according to one of the longest-standing literary traditions on Awaji, the place where the gods first stepped onto land.
What happened here
Onogoro, the self-curdled isle. The drop of brine that fell from Izanagi’s spear and congealed into the first island. The platform on which Izanagi and Izanami built their cosmic pillar, walked, married, and began the work of bearing Japan.
Three places on Awaji have, at different points in history, claimed to be Onogoro. Onokoro Jinja, in the rice fields of the southern interior. Nushima, the inhabited island off the southern coast. And Eshima.
Eshima’s claim is, in some ways, the most poetically convincing. It is small. It is offshore. It looks, from the right angle, exactly like a single drop of brine that has fallen from the sky and hardened into rock. Late Heian and Kamakura poets identified Eshima with Onogoro; the Edo-period kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga argued the same in print; and the association has persisted in literary tradition for the better part of a millennium.
What you’ll actually see
You will see the islet from the harbour-front in Iwaya, a one-minute walk from the ferry terminal. A short stone bridge once let visitors walk onto Eshima directly and circumnavigate the rock at its base. Since 2018, after storm damage made the islet unsafe, the bridge has been closed off with a locked fence at the Awaji-side entrance. The bridge itself is still there; you simply can’t cross it.
What remains is the view from the shore. Eshima sits about a hundred meters out, framed by the open water of the Akashi Strait. On clear days the great Akashi Strait Bridge to Honshu rises in the background. On stormy days the islet emerges and disappears in the mist. After dark the rock is lit by floodlights, the same view that Taira no Kiyomori is said to have come here to admire in the twelfth century.
Three things to look for
- The layered rock face — Eshima’s cliffs show distinct horizontal stratification, the result of roughly 35 million years of sedimentation. The geology is older than the mythology by an unimaginable margin, and somehow this is the right place to register that.
- The torii at the summit — small, recently restored, visible from the shore. It marks a stupa said to commemorate Matsuō-maru, the page who took the place of human pillars during Taira no Kiyomori’s harbour construction at Owada-no-tomari in the 1170s.
- The Saigyō stele — a poetry monument at the foot of the bridge inscribed with the priest-poet Saigyō’s twelfth-century waka written while gazing at this same islet under the moon.
How it fits the trail
Eshima makes the most romantic of the three Onogoro claims, and the one you cannot get close to. This is, in its own way, fitting — you stand on a clifftop or a harbour quay and look at a rock that may or may not be the first piece of Japan, separated from you by water you cannot cross.
If you are tracing the full kuni-umi narrative on Awaji, see Eshima first as you step off the ferry at Iwaya, then drive south to Onokoro Jinja for the inland alternative claim, and end at Izanagi Jingu for the place where the gods retired. The whole circuit can be done in a long day.