Kochi

The plain at the mouth of the Kagami and Enokuchi rivers was marshy and flood-prone, and the area was known as Kochi only after the town was built on it. In 1601 Yamauchi Kazutoyo, rewarded with the province of Tosa for his part at the battle of Sekigahara, began a castle on the low hill of Otakayama and laid out a town around it; the city took its name from the castle. The Yamauchi ruled Tosa until the end of the shogunate.

The domain's society was unusually divided. Retainers brought in by the Yamauchi held the senior posts, while the descendants of the previous Chosokabe lords formed a lower class of goshi, country samurai with land but little standing. Many of the men who pushed Tosa into national politics came from that group, among them Sakamoto Ryoma, who left the domain without permission, helped broker the alliance between Satsuma and Choshu that undermined the shogunate, and was assassinated in Kyoto in 1867. The domain's final lord advised the shogun to return power to the emperor the same year.

Much of the castle burned in 1727 and was rebuilt between 1729 and 1753, which is why its keep and palace, both surviving today, are eighteenth-century work. In the Meiji period Kochi became a prefectural capital and a centre of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement led by Itagaki Taisuke. Bombing in July 1945 destroyed much of the city but spared the castle. Post-war Kochi rebuilt as a market and administrative town, and it has since lived with the twin realities of a shrinking rural hinterland and the expectation of a great earthquake.

Kochi's self-image is built on Tosa independence: a place on the far side of the mountains, loyal to its own, and quick to produce troublemakers and reformers. Sakamoto Ryoma is everywhere, from the statue at Katsurahama to souvenir shops, and the Freedom and People's Rights Movement is remembered as the prefecture's second contribution to modern Japan. The dialect, Tosa-ben, is distinctive and freely used.

The Yosakoi festival dominates the summer. First held in 1954, it sets teams of dancers carrying wooden naruko clappers through streets and squares in August, with choreography and music reworked every year, and versions of it are now danced from Hokkaido to Okinawa. Pilgrims on the 88-temple circuit pass through on the long, thinly populated stretch of the route that Kochi people call the training ground.

Drinking is a social institution here, with cup-exchanging customs, the shared sawachi platter and a long-standing reputation for sake drinking. The Sunday market, running for about a kilometre along the avenue to the castle gate, is as much a weekly meeting as a place to shop. Paper-making at Ino, coral working and Tosa cutlery are the local crafts, and a long tradition of dog and bull contests survives in reduced form.

About 310,000 people live in Kochi, more than two-fifths of the population of a prefecture that is among Japan's most mountainous and most rapidly shrinking. The city is the administrative, retail and hospital centre for that whole area, and prefectural government, services and distribution employ far more people than factories do.

Agriculture and fishing shape the surrounding economy: greenhouse vegetables, aubergines, ginger and yuzu from the valleys, and skipjack tuna landed along the Tosa coast. Forestry covers the interior, where cedar and cypress plantations run up steep slopes. Tourism has grown around the castle, the markets and the rivers, but it is smaller than in the prefectures across the mountains.

Daily life is flat, low-rise and unhurried — trams every few minutes through the middle of town, bicycles on the grid of old streets, shutters down early in the outer arcades and the bar lanes filling after dark. The Sunday market marks the week. Behind it, two issues run through local conversation: the steady loss of young people to Osaka and Tokyo, which has left the prefecture with one of the oldest populations in the country, and preparation for a Nankai Trough earthquake and tsunami, which has brought evacuation towers, signed routes and regular drills to the low ground where most of the city sits.

Kochi is a fish prefecture, and its emblem is katsuo no tataki: a loin of skipjack tuna seared hard over a fire of burning rice straw so that the outside chars while the centre stays raw, then sliced thick and eaten with coarse salt or a citrus and soy dressing, with garlic, ginger and sliced onion. Spring fish are lean and fragrant, autumn fish fatter. Straw-fired searing is done in the open at Hirome Market and at restaurants along the coast.

The Tosa table is a shared one. Sawachi ryori piles sashimi, sushi, fried food, boiled dishes and sweets onto one large platter for the whole party, a style tied to the region's drinking culture. Other local foods include utsubo, moray eel, fried or stewed; whitebait served raw or on rice; dried bonito flakes and the broth made from them; and the kombu-and-citrus dressing known as tosa-zu. Chicken and gyoza stalls fill the food halls.

Yuzu is Kochi's great crop, grown in the mountain valleys and squeezed over fish, noodles and shochu, along with other citrus such as buntan pomelo. Ginger from the prefecture flavours pickles and drinks. Local sake breweries supply the dry style that suits raw fish, and the city keeps a fondness for aisukurin, a light, icy dairy sweet sold at kiosks at Katsurahama and around the castle.