The trail, day by day
Day 1: To the Beach Where the Gods Arrive
Morning
The journey begins where the rest of Japan ends. From Tokyo, the most beautiful way in is the Sunrise Izumo — a single overnight sleeper train that leaves Tokyo Station at 22:00 and rolls into Izumo-shi the following morning, the country flattening through the window and the Sea of Japan emerging at dawn. From Kyoto or Osaka, the Yakumo limited express runs the same line in about four hours. By air, Izumo Enmusubi Airport sits roughly thirty minutes from the shrine.
Afternoon
Settle into a ryokan in Taisha-mae, the small town that has grown up around the Grand Shrine. Most are family-run, with tatami rooms looking onto small inner gardens. Walk the main street, Shinmon-dori, slowly; the shops sell wooden talismans, paper omikuji boxes, and rakugan sweets shaped like clouds. Have a late lunch — Izumo soba, served warigo-style in three small lacquered bowls stacked one on top of the other, is the local thing to eat.
Evening
Twenty minutes' walk west of the shrine, the land breaks open onto Inasa-no-Hama — the beach where, by tradition, every god of Japan steps ashore each November to attend the divine assembly. A single sea-stone called Bentenjima rises offshore, crowned by a small torii. Stand on the sand at sunset. If your visit falls during the seven nights of Kamiari, this is where the priests come at nineteen hundred to greet the gods at the water's edge — a private ritual you cannot witness, but the beach itself is open to anyone who walks down to it.
Day 2: The Oldest Shrine in the Country
Morning
The traditional procession route, Kamimukae-no-michi, runs roughly a kilometre from the beach to the shrine. Walk it east in the cool of early morning, before the day-trippers arrive from Matsue. The road bends through old houses and lichen-stained walls and ends at the great wooden torii of Izumo Taisha.
Inside the precincts, the air shifts. The Honden — the inner sanctuary, dedicated to Ōkuninushi, the god of bonds — is closed to visitors except during specific ceremonies, but you can pay your respects from the rear platform, which is as close as most worshippers ever come. Note the protocol here: nirei shihakushu ichirei. Two bows, four claps, one bow. (At every other shrine in Japan, it is two claps, not four. Izumo has its own grammar.)
Afternoon
The vast Kagura-den, just south of the main precinct, holds the rope that has appeared on a thousand postcards: a coil of rice-straw thicker than a human body, more than thirteen metres long and several tonnes in weight. It is replaced once every six or seven years, the work of dozens of artisans from a single village in the mountains.
Spend the rest of the afternoon walking the eastern and western auxiliary shrines (jūkyū-sha) — nineteen small wooden buildings on each side of the precinct that, in November, are said to house the visiting kami of every province. There are no signs explaining this, no ropes, no fanfare. The buildings are simply there, waiting.
Evening
Dinner in Taisha-mae. Several soba shops near the shrine have been making warigo-style noodles since the Edo period; the Shimane Winery, a short bus or taxi ride away, pours local reds and whites that go surprisingly well with the duck and trout of the region. Bed early — the lighthouse calls in the morning.
Day 3: To the Lighthouse at the Edge of the World
Morning
From Izumo Taisha-mae station, the bus to Hinomisaki runs roughly hourly along a coastal road that hugs the cliffs. The journey takes about twenty-five minutes, past sea-bird colonies and pine forests bent permanently inland by the sea wind.
Hinomisaki Jinja sits on a small bay just before the cape: a vermilion-and-gold double shrine, dedicated jointly to Amaterasu and her younger brother Susanoo, set against blue water. It is one of the most photogenic shrines in the country and almost entirely empty most of the year.
Afternoon
From the shrine, a short walk leads to the lighthouse — a white stone tower over forty metres high, the tallest in Japan, completed in 1903. Climb the spiral staircase. From the top, on a clear day, the Oki Islands float fifty kilometres out in the Sea of Japan, and behind you the long curve of the Shimane coast runs back toward Inasa.
This is the western edge of Honshu. Past this point, there is only water, and then Korea.
Evening
Take the bus back to Izumo Taisha-mae. Either continue your travels — the Yakumo limited express runs through Matsue and onward to Okayama — or stay one more night in Taisha-mae, and watch a second sunset from Inasa-no-Hama before the long journey home. The gods, after all, are still arriving.