Itsukushima Shrine:
¥300, and go
before 09:00.

Two things printed on the first page of Google about this shrine are wrong, and both of them change what you do.

First, the price. Several pages ranking for Itsukushima Shrine list admission as ¥100. That is the elementary and junior-high-school rate. The adult ticket is ¥300 ($1.90); high school is ¥200; the combined ticket with the Treasure Hall is ¥500 ($3.17) for adults, ¥300 high school and ¥150 for elementary and junior high. It is still one of the cheapest UNESCO World Heritage admissions in Japan, so the correction costs you nothing — but arriving at a ticket window with the wrong number in your head is how people end up in the wrong queue.

Second, the scaffolding. The Great Torii's Reiwa-era restoration finished in December 2022. The gate has stood uncovered since then. At least one page-one result for this island still advises readers to skip Miyajima because the torii is wrapped in sheeting — that advice has been stale since December 2022, and following it would cost you the best day of a Hiroshima trip.

Third, the pagoda. Miyajima's five-storey pagoda has been fully sheeted for preservation work since 20 January 2025, and the works are scheduled to run to about November 2027. Until then it stands under scaffolding and sheeting, and every photograph you have seen of it is pre-2025 — plan the shot you actually can take instead. The shrine, the Great Torii and Senjōkaku beside it are unaffected — but if the five-storey pagoda on the hill is in the shot you have been planning, it is not available: the shrine schedules the restoration to November 2027.

And one thing almost nobody prints: Senjōkaku, the vast unfinished timber hall on the rise next to the pagoda, is ¥100 ($0.63), takes no credit cards, and shuts earlier than the shrine. It is the best-value ticket in the prefecture and it takes 15 minutes. The Treasure Hall is a separate ¥300, or ¥500 combined with the shrine — and the combined ticket is sold only at the shrine entrance, while the hall shuts no later than the shrine does. So buy the combined ticket on the way in and go to the hall straight after the shrine, not at the end of the day.

The whole island was treated as sacred, which meant commoners could not set foot on it — so the shrine was built out over the tidal flat, on piles, and pilgrims arrived by boat through the Great Torii. That is why the corridors matter: at high water the vermilion galleries and the stage stand over the sea, and the reflection is the architecture working as intended. On a low tide you are looking at the same building on mud, and it is a fraction of the experience.

Miyajima runs on the tide, not the clock. Above 250cm the Great Torii appears to float and the shrine's corridors stand over water; below 100cm you can walk out across the sand to the gate's legs. Those are the Miyajima Tourist Association's own published thresholds, read against its own tide table — which is the Hiroshima Port table, with Miyajima running slightly earlier. A generic tide app uses a different reference point, so its numbers look similar and are not comparable. Check the official table before you book the ferry, not after.

The current layout dates from a 12th-century reconstruction under Taira no Kiyomori, though the structure has been rebuilt many times since — typhoons and fires do not spare buildings that sit in the sea. The Great Torii is the eighth gate on the site, dating from 1875, and it is not driven into the seabed: it stands on its own weight, which is roughly 60 tonnes, with stones packed into the box beams above.

One practical note that follows from all of this: the corridor is one-way and narrow, and between 10:00 and 15:00 it moves at the pace of the slowest tour group. Forty minutes at 08:00 does what ninety minutes at noon does. If you want the empty version, take the first ferries — the timings are here.