Itsukushima Island

This guide to Itsukushima Island in Hiroshima opens with a strange rule: nothing that dies is allowed to remain on this sacred ground, and a storm in the autumn of 1555 that nearly broke it. You'll hear about the warlord Sue Harukata, who had already forced his own lord to suicide and ruled through a puppet, and about his rival Mori Motonari, who could not beat him in open battle and instead built a small, deliberately weak-looking castle on the hill behind the shrine. The guide follows Harukata as he lands as many as thirty thousand men to crush a garrison a fraction of that size, certain the fight is already won. Listen for what Motonari's fleet was doing under cover of the storm that same night.