Shimane

At most shrines in Japan the etiquette is two bows, two claps, one bow. At Izumo it is four claps, and the difference is not a quirk — it marks a strand of religious practice that predates the standard form and never adopted it. The same independence shows up in the calendar. The tenth lunar month is known nationally as the month without gods; in Izumo it is the month with gods, because they are understood to be gathering here rather than absent.

What this means for a visit is that Shimane rewards arriving with some idea of what you are looking at. The buildings are not simply older versions of shrines you have seen elsewhere; the architecture belongs to a lineage that runs parallel to the more familiar one. Read a paragraph about the chronicles before you come and the place stops being a large rope and a queue, and becomes the most interesting religious site in the country.

Three days, and Shimane is the prefecture that most rewards them because its three destinations are genuinely unlike each other. Izumo Taisha, one of the oldest and most important shrines in the country, is at the eastern end. Matsue, a castle town on a lake with one of the surviving original keeps, is forty minutes away. And Iwami Ginzan, a silver mine that financed a third of the world's silver trade in the sixteenth century, is two hours west.

Add the Oki Islands, a ferry of two to three hours out into the Sea of Japan, and you have a five-day trip that almost nobody makes — the islands were an imperial place of exile and still feel like somewhere the mainland forgot.

Izumo to Matsue is a short train ride; Matsue to Iwami Ginzan is the long leg and is much easier by car. Yonago in Tottori is next door, which is why the two prefectures are usually done together.

There is no shinkansen on this coast. The usual approach is the Sanyo Shinkansen to Okayama and then the Yakumo limited express north to Matsue, about two and a half hours, or a flight into Izumo Airport, roughly an hour and a half from Haneda. The overnight Sunrise Izumo sleeper runs from Tokyo and is a genuine option. Locally the JR San'in line links Matsue, Izumo and the west, but it is slow and infrequent; the private Ichibata line also runs from Matsue to Izumo Taisha. Iwami Ginzan needs a bus from Odashi Station and is then walked or cycled. A car is the sensible choice for anything off the coastal line.

Iwami Ginzan supplied a substantial share of the world's silver in the sixteenth century, which sets an expectation of headframes and slag heaps. What is actually there is a narrow green valley with tunnel mouths cut into the hillside, a preserved town of wooden houses along the stream, and a walking or cycling route joining them. The scale of what happened here is legible in the number of tunnels rather than in any single structure.

That makes it a slower visit than most heritage sites and a better one. Allow a half day at minimum, expect to be walking on unpaved ground, and take the route out to one of the smaller tunnel mouths rather than only the main one — the difference between the two experiences is large. The town at the valley mouth is where you eat and where the buses turn around, and it is worth its own hour.

The coastal railway serves Matsue, Izumo and, slowly, the west. Matsue and Izumo are easy without a car — a private line links them, and the shrine and the castle are both close to their stations.

Iwami Ginzan is where trains stop being enough: it is a bus from Odashi Station and the site itself is a walking valley of tunnels, temples and a preserved town. A car makes the western half of the prefecture workable rather than an exercise in timetables. For the Oki Islands, take the ferry and rent something on arrival — the islands are bigger than they look and their bus services are minimal.

Winter on this coast is grey, wet and windy, and the ferries to Oki cancel in storms. The mainland sights stay open and Matsue under snow is atmospheric, but a trip built around the islands in January is a gamble.

The other thing to plan around is the tenth lunar month, when Izumo hosts the gathering of the gods and the shrine is at its busiest — a fascinating time to be there if you want the ritual and a poor one if you want quiet. Otherwise Shimane is a spring-to-autumn prefecture with a long, pleasant shoulder season and very little competition for space.

The San'in coast is wet and grey through winter, with steady rain rather than deep snow near the sea and January highs around 9°C; the inland hills do get snow. Kamiarizuki, the divine gathering at Izumo, falls in the tenth lunar month, which lands in November, and the shrine's rites through that week are the main annual event. Summers are humid and hot in the low 30s°C. The Adachi Museum's garden is composed to be seen through windows and is deliberately good in all four seasons, snow included. Spring and autumn are the easiest for the Iwami Ginzan walking routes.

Izumo soba is served cold in stacked round lacquer dishes called wari-go, with the sauce poured over the noodles rather than the noodles dipped, and the buckwheat is milled with the husk so it comes out dark. Lake Shinji supplies shijimi, small brackish-water clams, in a miso soup that Matsue drinks at breakfast. Nodoguro, the fatty rockfish of the San'in coast, is grilled and is the local luxury. Matsue was a tea town under its last daimyo, so wagashi shops there are unusually good and pair with matcha in the castle-side teahouses.

A first visit is Izumo and Matsue. The shrine is architecturally distinct from almost anything else in the country — an enormous thatched roof, an unusual clapping etiquette, and a foundation myth that predates the imperial one at Ise — and Matsue gives you an original castle keep, a lake that turns orange at sunset, and the house where Lafcadio Hearn wrote the books that introduced Japan to English readers.

A second visit is Iwami Ginzan and the Oki Islands. The mine is a UNESCO site that looks like a wooded valley until you understand what you are walking through: hundreds of tunnels, a vanished town of twenty thousand people, and a preserved settlement at the mouth of it. The islands beyond are volcanic, sea-cliffed and almost entirely unvisited.