AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Most visitors to Miyajima never look past the floating torii of Itsukushima Shrine. But on the island's hidden eastern shore, where deer pick their way through mounds of oyster shells, lie the Takanosu Low Battery Ruins (鷹ノ巣低砲台跡) — a decayed Meiji-era coastal gun emplacement that once guarded the sea lane into Hiroshima Bay and the naval base at Kure.↗↗
This is not a tidy, cordoned-off heritage site but a genuine ruin in the landscape: granite and concrete gun bases half-slid down the beach, a brick-lined chamber with its chimney-like ventilation shaft still standing on the slope, and old military boundary stones lining the access road. For war-history and industrial-heritage travellers, it offers a rare, atmospheric glimpse of the 'back side' of the so-called Isle of the Gods — and it costs nothing and is open year-round.↗↗
A Fort Built to Close the Sea Gate
The battery belongs to the Hiroshima Bay Fortress (広島湾要塞), an interconnected chain of coastal forts the Japanese Army threw up in the 1890s, when tension with Russia was rising and the Navy's vital anchorage at Kure needed protection from hostile warships. To seal off the waters of Hiroshima Bay, gun positions and redoubts were clustered around the four main straits — Nasami, Ōno, Hayase and Sound — and the heavily trafficked Nasami Seto channel, where large ships could still pass between Miyajima and the island of Ōnasami-jima, was bristling with four batteries and two redoubts.
