Day 1｜October 20
Our guests had arrived the evening before, travelling from Kyoto by train and spending their first night at Kotohira Kadan in Konpira Onsen. In the morning we drove to Yashima and visited Yashimaji, the 84th temple of the Shikoku pilgrimage, standing on a flat-topped plateau above the Seto Inland Sea. In Ritsurin Garden they were served tea in one of the garden’s teahouses, with the ponds, pines and Mount Shiun borrowed as a backdrop — a scene composed over more than a century of work by the feudal lords of Takamatsu. The afternoon was given to the crafts of Kagawa. A second night at Kotohira Kadan.
Day 2｜October 21
A morning in Kotohira. Our guests visited Kinryo no Sato, a working sake brewery with a museum in its old warehouses, and Kanamaruza, built in 1835 and the oldest surviving kabuki playhouse in Japan — the stage machinery beneath the floor is still worked by hand. They then climbed the stone steps to Kotohira-gu, 785 of them to the main shrine, long a destination of pilgrimage for seafarers. The afternoon was spent crossing the mountains into Kochi, and the night at Auberge Tosayama, in a villa in the hills outside the city.
Day 3｜October 22
A day in and around Kochi City. Our guests visited Chikurinji, the 31st temple of the pilgrimage, and its garden, said to have been laid out by the monk Muso Soseki, then the Makino Botanical Garden on the same hill, named for the botanist who described some 1,500 plants. In the afternoon they went out to Katsurahama, the beach where a statue of Sakamoto Ryoma looks out over the Pacific, and climbed to the keep of Kochi Castle — the only castle in Japan where both the original keep and the lord’s residence at its foot survive. A second night at Auberge Tosayama.
Day 4｜October 23
Leaving the coast for the interior, our guests took a sightseeing boat through Oboke Gorge, where the Yoshino River has cut into rock folded and lifted by the movement of the earth, the strata standing almost vertical along the water. Further up the valley they crossed the Iya Kazurabashi, a bridge woven from mountain vine and rebuilt every three years in the way it always has been. The road continued deeper still, to Oku-Iya, and the night was spent at Ungai, a thatched farmhouse of the Togenkyo-Iya project, with dinner brought in and served at the house.
Day 5｜October 24
A day in Oku-Iya with a local guide. Our guests walked through Ochiai, a settlement laid out on a mountainside with some 390 metres of elevation between its lowest and highest houses, still farmed in terraces and designated an Important Preservation District. They then tried their hand at making Iya soba, the coarse, short-cut buckwheat noodle of these mountains, and ate what they had made for lunch. In the afternoon they visited the Higashi-Iya Museum of History and Folklore, where the valley’s long association with the defeated Heike clan is set out. The night was spent at Hotel Iya Onsen, where a private cable car runs down the gorge wall to an open-air bath at the river’s edge.
Day 6｜October 25
Coming down from the mountains to Wakimachi in Mima City, our guests walked the udatsu townscape — a street of merchant houses whose raised firebreak walls were built as much to display wealth as to stop flames, wealth that came from the indigo trade. They then dyed cloth with Awa indigo at a local workshop, working the fabric in vats of fermented dye. Continuing to Naruto, they boarded a boat to see the whirlpools of the strait, timed for a spring tide, when the current runs at its strongest. The night was spent at Hotel Ridge.
Day 7｜October 26
A day left open at Naruto. The hotel stands in its own grounds above the coast, and the day was theirs — to walk the gardens, to rest, or to go out to one of the sake breweries in the town, where rice from the Yoshino River plain has been brewed for generations. A second night at Hotel Ridge.
Day 8｜October 27
Our guests left Naruto, closing an eight-day journey that had run from the stone steps of Kotohira to the Pacific at Katsurahama, up into the Iya valley and out to the whirlpools of the strait.
