My alarm sounded at 6:45 a.m., but I quickly silenced it and rolled over in my futon. I enjoyed a fleeting moment of quietude before the thrumming of rubber soles on pavement and accompanying excited voices crescendoed, a brief multilingual hubbub that then faded away for a minute or two before rising up again. It was starting.
A stone's throw from my hotel, the various ferries and fast boats had begun to disgorge waves of day-trippers to Miyajima Island, and these sightseers invariably made a beeline to Itsukushima Shrine and its world famous floating torii. This route took them down the crescent boulevard along the waterfront and directly beneath my rented room.
Heaving a tired sigh, I hoisted myself from the floor and looked out the window across the stretch of Hiroshima Prefecture's Seto Inland Sea that separated me from the mainland. Each gaggle of visitors on the street below sounded larger than the one before, and I could see another ferry just coming in.