Between the 1970s and 1980s, 560,000 tonnes of industrial toxic waste were dumped on an island in the Seto Inland Sea. Decades later, that same island holds one of the most quietly extraordinary art museums on earth. The distance between those two facts is the whole story.
On March 27, 2026, we took the 9:52 ferry from Uno Port to Naoshima.
The Background
The islands had been emptying out for decades. Young people left for the cities. Fishing collapsed. What remained were elderly residents and silence.
Soichiro Fukutake, chairman of the Benesse Corporation, grew up near these waters. His response was not charity or industry. It was art. World-class contemporary art placed in and around the villages, designed by Tadao Ando — a self-taught architect from Osaka who builds with raw concrete and natural light. The idea was not to create a tourist attraction. It was to give the islands a reason to exist again.
It worked, partially. Around 500 new residents have moved to Naoshima in recent years. But the tension is visible. We were walking through neighborhoods, not galleries. Laundry hung between the installations. Cats slept on the walls of houses that were not art.
Day One — Naoshima
We had planned to rent e-bikes at Miyanoura Port, but arriving last minute meant none were available. So we walked. It turned out to be the better choice — Naoshima is smaller than it looks on a map, and on foot you notice more. There is also a shuttle bus that connects the main areas, but we never needed it. We walked to Honmura, a fishing village where seven abandoned houses have been turned into permanent art installations. The Art House Project. We bought a combined ticket at the village office for 1,050 yen and started walking the lanes.
The installations were quiet and strange. At Go'o Shrine, a glass staircase descends underground beneath a functioning Shinto shrine. Hiroshi Sugimoto designed it — a passage between the world above and the world below. At Minamidera, we sat in total darkness for fifteen minutes. Slowly, so slowly that we doubted it was happening, a faint glow appeared. James Turrell. The piece exists in the transition between blindness and sight.
But the real experience was between the houses. Narrow lanes with old wooden facades, stone walls, small garden shrines, a grandmother sorting dried fish on a tray. The village has existed for centuries. The art arrived later and lives inside it, not the other way around.
At Gokaisho, Yoshihiro Suda filled a tatami room with hand-carved wooden camellia flowers. Through the window, a garden of real camellias. The wooden ones were more precise, more still — and somehow less convincing. The point, maybe.
After lunch at a small place in Honmura — grilled fish, rice, miso — we walked around the island toward the Benesse area for our timed slot at Chichu Art Museum. Tadao Ando built it entirely underground so it would not disturb the landscape. Inside, there are only three artists. Claude Monet. James Turrell. Walter De Maria.
The Monet room is the reason the museum exists. Five Water Lilies paintings in a white chamber. No glass over the canvases. No artificial light. We removed our shoes at the entrance and stood on white marble tiles. Natural light poured through openings in the ceiling. The paintings shifted with the clouds. Other visitors moved slowly or stood still. Nobody spoke above a whisper. It felt less like a museum and more like something older. A chapel, maybe. A place where looking is the whole act.
We walked around the island for another hour, took photographs at the yellow pumpkin, sat on a bench near the pier. By late afternoon, the day-trippers had started thinning out. The streets quieted. Fishing boats rocked in the harbor. We caught the evening ferry back to Uno, watching Naoshima shrink across flat water.
Day Two — Teshima
The next morning we took the ferry from Uno Port again, this time to Teshima.
At Ieura Port on Teshima, we rented e-bikes immediately. The island is steep and green. Without electric assist, the hills would be brutal.
Our first stop was "Beyond the Border — Prayer" by Lin Shuen-Long. On a beach, 197 child statues stand in soft sand — one for each country in the world. Each figure faces the direction of its nation's capital, coordinates and distance marked at its feet. They lean forward slightly, hands pressed to their chests. We walked among them with a compass, reading the numbers, trying to find Greece. It took a while. When we found it — small, facing west-northwest — we stood there longer than we probably needed to.
From there we cycled to Teshima Art Museum. Uphill through terraced rice fields that dropped toward the sea. Stone walls lined with moss. No traffic. No sound except the motor hum of the bike and wind. The ride was half the visit.
The museum itself is a white concrete shell shaped like a water droplet, designed by Ryue Nishizawa. Two oval openings in the roof let in sky, wind, insects, rain. Inside, the artist Rei Naito created something almost invisible. Water emerges from tiny holes in the polished concrete floor. The droplets move, merge, split, travel in thin streams across the surface. We removed our shoes and sat on the floor. No photographs allowed. No talking. We watched water move for over an hour. Other visitors sat scattered around the space, each in their own silence. Wind came through the ceiling. A bird flew through.
Lunch was at Shima Kitchen — a renovated village house near Ieura Port. Local women cook using island vegetables and fish from the Seto Inland Sea. The set meal came on a wooden tray: rice, pickled vegetables, grilled fish, clear soup. Simple and precise.
Stillness
We visited in a non-Triennale year. The next festival is 2028. The islands were not crowded. At several points during the two days, we were alone — on paths, in villages, in front of the sea.
What stayed with us was not any single piece of art. It was the relationship between the art and the place. The installations did not replace the islands' identity. They gave the islands a new one, or maybe returned an old one — a reason to be looked at carefully, to be sat with, to be quiet in. The villages are still villages. The fishermen still go out. Grandmothers still hang laundry.
On the evening ferry back to Uno, the engine cut across still water. The islands shrank behind us. They looked the same as they must have looked fifty years ago — small, green, ordinary. But they are not ordinary anymore. That is the whole point, and also the whole tension.
We were full — of images, of silence, of the kind of tiredness that comes from looking carefully all day. Back in Uno, we found a quiet place for dinner, slept early, and the next morning caught the train to Hiroshima.
