Shōnan

This article is about a region of Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. For the former town in Chiba Prefecture, see Shōnan, Chiba. For the Japanese football club, see Shonan Bellmare.

Shōnan (湘南) is the name of a region along the coast of Sagami Bay in central Japan. Centered on Enoshima, an island about 50 kilometers southwest of Tokyo, the Shōnan region stretches from Ōiso in the west to Hayama in the east, including Hiratsuka, Chigasaki, and Kamakura. Because of the bay, the region benefits from a mild climate and long beaches covered with dark volcanic sand.

Overview

In postwar times, the Shōnan region gained prominence in Ishihara Shintaro's prize-winning 1955 novel, Taiyō no Kisetsu (Season of the Sun). The novel, which was also made into a popular movie, portrayed the hedonistic lifestyle of young sun-worshippers from elite families (taiyo-zoku, the "sun-tribe"), who hung out on Shōnan beaches. Lying as it does on the edge of the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area, the Shōnan region is nowadays a leading resort area, oriented to surfing, sailboating, and other water sports.

The region's name, Shōnan, derives from a scenic region in Hunan, China, encapsulated in the phrase 瀟湘湖南 (Chinese pinyin: "xiāo xiāng hú nán"; Japanese: "shōshō konan"). This phrase refers to a beautiful area centered on the Xiao River (瀟江) and the Xiang River (湘江) south of the Yangtze River in Hunan. Often praised in Chinese poetry of the Xiaoxiang genre, the scenery of this area became a stylized popular subject of paintings in both medieval China and Japan, particularly as to the graphic and poetic series known as the "Eight Views of Xiaoxiang". In Japan, the scenery of the Shōnan area was thought to be similar to the scenery around the Xiao and Xiang rivers in Hunan, China; hence the term "Shōnan" (Chinese pinyin: "xiāng nán", another name for the southern Hunan region) came to be applied to the area around Enoshima in Japan.

Besides the similarity in scenery, the two areas both had flood-basin lakes. The lake in China, which still exists, is Lake Dongting. Among others, the lake is fed by the Xiang and Xiao rivers (the Xiao is a tributary of the Xiang). In Japan, the corresponding flood-basin lake (which no longer exists but was mentioned in the Enoshima Engi) was probably located along the course of the Kashio River, which flows into Sagami Bay (via the Katase River) at Enoshima.

J-Pop Empress Ayumi Hamasaki is known to have set up a restaurant here called "Rainbow House" around 2002–2004. it was occasionally used in episodes of her talk show Ayuready?.