The travelling poet Matsuo Bashō, setting eyes on Matsushima, was
apparently so overcome by what he saw that it left him speechless. In
an apocryphal but now immortal haiku, he could only remark:
Matsushima, ah!
A-ah, Matsushima ah!
Matsushima, ah!
Writing in Oku no Hosomichi,
he described it as 'the most beautiful spot in the whole country of
Japan...Tall islands point to the sky and level ones prostrate
themselves before the surges of water. Islands are piled above
islands, and islands are joined to islands, so that they look exactly
like parents caressing their children or walking with them arm in
arm. The pines are of the freshest green and their branches are
curved in exquisite lines, bent by the wind constantly blowing
through them...My pen strove in vain to equal this superb creation of
divine artifice.'
And Bashō was not alone in this
view. Matsushima, whose bay sits just up the coast from Sendai, is
established in canon as one of the Three Views of Japan, along with
the Itsukushima Shrine gate opposite Hiroshima and Kyoto's Amanohashidate sandbar of pines.
