豊島

The ferry from Takamatsu pulls into Ieura, and the first thing one notices is how the slope of Mount Dan rises directly from the harbor, its sudden forest of old sudajii trees pressing close to the road. Water runs everywhere on this island — from the springs at Karato no Shimizu down through the terraced rice fields, a quiet hydraulics that has shaped farming here for centuries. Teshima is part of Tonosho in Kagawa, set in the eastern Seto Inland Sea, and the texture of its days is built from this geography of water and stone.

The art arrived later, after the years when the island was better known for the industrial waste dumped on its northern shore — a wound the residents fought, and which was finally cleared away. Now the Teshima Art Museum sits on a hillside above Karato, and the Yokoo House holds its rooms in Ieura, and Shima Kitchen serves meals where neighbors and visitors share a table. The pieces are folded into the landscape rather than imposed on it; one walks past mikan groves and olive trees to reach them.

What lingers is the coexistence of registers. The torii at Ieura Hachiman is cut from Teshima stone, quarried here since the Heian period. Inns like Umitota and Lemon Hotel were art-festival works first, lodgings second. A season spent here would mean learning the shuttle bus timetable, the ferry connections to Naoshima and Inujima, the rhythm of strawberry season and lemon harvest — an island still working, with the Setouchi Triennale passing through as one current among several.