Tainoura

Sea bream are deep-water fish that do not normally school at the surface. In the bay at Kominato they do, in numbers, and have done for as long as anyone has recorded — the reason is not fully understood. The tradition here is that they gathered when Nichiren, the founder of the Nichiren school of Buddhism, was born on this shore in 1222, and they have been treated as manifestations of him ever since. Nobody fishes them. The site is a designated Special Natural Monument, the only one of its kind in Chiba.

A small boat takes you out from beside Tanjoji, the temple built at his birthplace, and the crew scatter feed until the water boils with fish. It costs ¥1,200 and takes about half an hour. The building at the pier has a shop, an exhibition floor and an observation room looking over the bay. Whatever you make of the theology, several centuries of a protected fish population in one bay is a genuinely unusual thing.