ABSTRACT
The island, an outcrop of granite that has an area of approximately eleven and one-half square miles, lies in Hiro shima Bay, part of the Seto Naikai, the Inland Sea, which is surrounded by the large islands of Honshū, Kyūshū, and Shikoku. At some unknown date, but probably well before the sixth century A.D., a local cult of the sea goddesses developed among the fishing villages on the nearby Honshū coast and on the islands in the bay, just as elsewhere in Japan other natural objects and phenomena became the basis of other cults, most notably the worship of the sun goddess at Ise. At this time Miyajima appears to have been known as Aki, which was also the name of the ancient province it occupied until Hiroshima was created in the 1870s.
