Tanesashi Coast

The unusual thing about Tanesashi is that the grass runs to the rocks. Natural turf — grazed by horses for centuries, which is why it is turf and not scrub — comes right down to the shoreline and stops at the tide line, so that you walk out of a meadow onto black rock with the Pacific in front of you. There is nothing else quite like it on the Japanese coast, and it is part of the Sanriku Fukko National Park.

At the northern end sits Kabushima, formerly an island and now joined to the shore, which is a designated national natural monument for a specific reason: it is a black-tailed gull breeding colony, some thirty thousand birds, nesting on the ground around a shrine, at head height, without any regard for the people walking through them. From February to August the noise is continuous. Umbrellas are provided, and you should use one.

The grazing history behind the turf is not incidental — horses were worked along this coast for generations, and the low, dense grass that resulted is ecologically distinct from the scrub and brush that colonizes most undisturbed Japanese coastline left to its own devices. That distinction is why the area was folded into Sanriku Fukko National Park rather than left as an ordinary stretch of shore, and why walking it feels closer to crossing open pastureland in the British Isles than to hiking a typical Japanese coastal trail. The black pillow lava and jointed volcanic rock exposed where the grass ends adds a second layer of interest for visitors who know a little geology, since the rock formations along this section of coast record volcanic activity distinct from the younger formations found elsewhere in the prefecture. Kabushima's gull colony, meanwhile, has been documented on this same low rock for well over a century, and the shrine at its center, dedicated to the goddess of good fortune, has coexisted with the nesting birds long enough that the relationship between shrine visitors and the wildlife is now treated as part of the site's character rather than an inconvenience to be managed away.