Shodoshima, the Island of Fragrances

The moment you alight from Tonosho Port, you will be surrounded by the scent of sesame oil. That is because Japan’s leading brand of sesame oil for 160 years and running is located on this island. Follow the shoreline and you’ll come across rows of olive trees, and during the harvest season trucks pass by, their beds loaded with citrus fruits whose aromas are spellbinding.

Shodoshima Island has a big presence in the manufacture of foods such as somen noodles, soy sauce, agriculture and other processed goods. However, we would like to begin our tale with “stone,” as Shodoshima was once the leading manufacturing region of stone products in all of Japan.

Let’s go back 400 years through time. When the Edo shogunate unified Japan under one banner, Osaka Castle was rebuilt. At that time, Shodoshima Island, among other isles in the Inland Sea, cut large quantities of stone. Shodoshima granite was lustrous, easy to manufacture, and contained no discoloration. It was highly prized in Osaka also due to the short distance between the two.

The islands of the Inland Sea have very little level ground, and megaliths can be clearly seen on their mountainous surfaces, which are mined with iron wedges. One needs an eye for stone in order to extract the largest ones. At Tenguiwa you might see traces of the extraction of those huge stones.
If you can make it to Tenguiwa, we encourage you to climb the mountain road to the top. It is a bit of a hike, and the road is littered with large rocks. It is a mystery how and why these stones were simply left there, but they lend a sense of dynamism to the remains of a quarry.

Hauling stone to Osaka by boat let the two regions’ population mingle, which led to the birth of Shodoshima’s flagship industry.