4432-4432 Travel Guide

Miyanoura Gallery Rokku is an art facility five minutes on foot from Miyanoura Port on Naoshima. Once the island's beloved pachinko parlour Pachinko Paradise Three Nine, it was converted in 2013 by architect Taiga Nishizawa, keeping the original facade and using some 400 ceiling louvers for natural light. Since 2019 it has hosted Motoyuki Shitamichi's Setouchi Archive project on the region's landscapes, folklore and history, with the neighbouring former yakiniku restaurant Henkotsu serving as a community lab.

Island Hut (Shima-koya) is a small art outpost within Naoshima's creative fabric, tucked in the residential strip between Honmura and the port. It keeps the plain form of an old island storehouse or hut, its interior serving as a flexible space for installations and community events — a light node linking local life and visitors during the art festivals.

The Double-O-Seven Museum is a small Naoshima curiosity themed around the spy-pop-culture world of James Bond, tucked in the old street near Miyanoura Port. With props, posters and playful displays evoking the 007 films, it carries a nostalgic, light-hearted vibe — an offbeat break from the island's art trail.

Ishibashi is Rei Naito's 'Stone Garden' for Naoshima's Art House Project. In a small courtyard of white pebbles sits a single stone; light, material and emptiness form a minimal meditative space echoing the 'less is more' spirit of Japanese karesansui. Visitors remove shoes and enter in silence to feel the room breathe.

Gokaisho is an Art House Project space on Naoshima, converted from a former Go (board game) club — and it is by woodcarving artist Yoshihiro Suda, not to be confused with Tatsuo Miyajima's Sea of Time at Kadoya, a completely different work. Suda took his cue from Hayami Gyoshu's famous painting 'Camellia Tree' (designated an Important Cultural Property of the Showa era), scattering delicate wooden camellia carvings across the small tatami room, while the adjoining garden grows real five-colour camellias — real and carved blooms facing each other, because 'inconspicuousness is part of looking'. The old timber house keeps its quiet atmosphere; the space is small but magnifies overlooked everyday detail into poetry. Along with Kadoya, Go'o Shrine, Ishibashi and Haisha, it dots the lanes of Honmura and is best seen on a stroll.

Haisha ('Dentist') is Shinro Otake's riotously colourful conversion of an abandoned dental clinic in Naoshima's Honmura. The exterior is tiled in mosaics, old signboards and tooth motifs; inside, collages of magazines, neon and bric-a-brac pile up — absurd yet playful, the most streetwise and whimsical of the Art House Project.