Naruto whirlpools — scenic viewpoint
Hellbuny · CC BY-SA 3.0

Naruto whirlpools

  • 2 min read
  • 34.238° N 134.651° E

Interesting facts

  • At spring tides the largest Naruto vortices are sometimes said to reach 30 metres across, which would place them among the biggest tidal whirlpools on Earth.
  • The eddies spin both clockwise and anticlockwise, merging and splitting as they drift, and some are thought to reach more than 20 metres deep.
  • Japanese sources sometimes rank the Naruto current with the Strait of Messina and Canada's Seymour Narrows as the world's three great tidal races.
  • Among tidal streams, only Saltstraumen, the Moskenstraumen and the Old Sow whirlpool in New Brunswick are usually rated faster than the Naruto current.
  • The lower deck of the Ōnaruto Bridge was built strong enough for a double-track Shikoku Shinkansen line, planned in 1973 but never laid.
  • Just 80 days after the bridge opened in 1985, the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge was redesigned as road-only, ending hopes of a rail link via Awaji.
  • The Uzu-no-Michi walkway, opened in April 2000 in the unused rail space, runs about 450 metres out to a glass floor some 45 metres above the water.
  • The walkway is walled mostly with metal mesh rather than glass, so wind blows straight through and does not load the suspension structure.
  • Uzu-no-Michi welcomed its ten-millionth visitor in August 2016, about sixteen years after opening.
  • Tokushima's professional football club, Tokushima Vortis, takes its name from an invented word based on the Italian for vortex, a nod to the whirlpools.

Why it is worth it

Four times a day the sea itself starts to turn in the Naruto Strait. The channel between Naruto on Shikoku and Awaji Island is only about 1.3 km wide, yet it is one of the gates through which the tides of the Pacific fill and drain the Seto Inland Sea. With each change of tide the water level on the two sides can differ by up to 1.5 metres, and the whole mass of water is forced through the narrows at roughly 13 to 15 km/h – up to about 20 km/h at spring tides. Where the fast stream meets slower water, it spins off whirlpools that can reach some 20 metres across, form, drift and collapse within moments.

The current here is counted as the fastest in Japan and among the fastest tidal streams anywhere; only a handful of places, such as Saltstraumen and the Moskenstraumen in northern Norway, are faster. Because the flow reverses with the tide, the spectacle comes and goes on a schedule: the water runs in twice a day and out twice a day, and the vortices are strongest around those peaks rather than at slack water.

The whirlpools have long been part of Japanese visual culture – Hiroshige included a Naruto whirlpool among his woodblock landscapes – and they gave their name to narutomaki, the fish cake with a pink spiral familiar from bowls of ramen. Since 1985 the strait has been spanned by the Ōnaruto Bridge, a suspension bridge with an 876-metre main span about 41 metres above the sea. Space left beneath its deck for a high-speed railway that was never built now serves as a glass-floored walkway from which the eddies can be watched directly below; they are also seen from tour boats and from the shore of Awaji.

Naruto itself is a coastal city of around 56,000 people at the north-eastern tip of Tokushima Prefecture, facing the Inland Sea to the north and the Kii Channel to the east.

Getting there

The strait lies about 8 km north-east of central Naruto, at the Shikoku end of the Ōnaruto Bridge. The nearest airport is Tokushima Awaodori Airport (TKS), about 12 km away. The Kobe-Awaji-Naruto Expressway crosses the strait on the Ōnaruto Bridge, linking Awaji Island and the Kobe area with Shikoku.

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From the encyclopaedia

The Naruto whirlpools are tidal whirlpools in the Naruto Strait, a channel between Naruto in Tokushima and Awaji Island in Hyōgo, Japan. The strait between Naruto and Awaji island has a width of about 1.3 km. The strait is one of the connections between the Pacific Ocean and the Inland Sea, a body of water separating Honshū and Shikoku, two of the main islands of Japan. The tide moves large amounts of water into and out of the Inland Sea twice a day. With a range of up to 1.7 m (5.6 ft), the tide creates a difference in the water level of up to 1.5 m between the Inland Sea and the Pacific. Due to the narrowness of the strait, the water rushes through the Naruto channel at a speed of about 13–15 km/h (8–9 mph) four times a day, twice flowing in and twice flowing out. During a spring tide, the speed of the water may reach 20 km/h (12 mph), creating vortices up to 20 m (66 ft) in diameter.

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