Matsuyama

The hot spring at Dogo is the oldest thing here: it appears in the eighth-century chronicles and in the Man'yoshu poetry collection, and legend has visiting princes and the regent Shotoku bathing in it. Through the medieval centuries the plain was held by the Kono clan from Yuzuki Castle, a moated fortress on the low hill in what is now Dogo Park, and the district grew up around the bath and the pilgrimage temples.

The city proper began in 1602, when Kato Yoshiaki started a castle on Mount Katsuyama and gave the new town the name Matsuyama. He was moved on before it was finished; the Gamo family followed, and from the 1630s a branch of the Matsudaira, relatives of the Tokugawa shoguns, ruled the Iyo-Matsuyama domain until the Meiji Restoration. Lightning burned the keep in 1784, and the rebuilt one, completed in the 1850s, is the one that stands today — among the last castle keeps raised in the feudal era.

The modern city took shape around the castle and the silk, cotton and kasuri-weaving trades. Masaoka Shiki was born here in 1867 and remade Japanese haiku before his early death, and his friend Natsume Soseki taught at the middle school here in the 1890s, drawing on the experience for the comic novel Botchan, which the city has traded on ever since. An air raid in July 1945 destroyed much of the centre and burned several castle buildings, though the keep survived. Rebuilt, merged with neighbouring towns and given a university and a port, Matsuyama became Shikoku's largest city and the island's commercial centre.

Matsuyama calls itself a city of haiku, and means it. Shiki's insistence on writing from direct observation changed the form nationally, and his disciples Takahama Kyoshi and Kawahigashi Hekigoto carried the work on. Post boxes shaped for haiku submissions stand at the castle, the station and Dogo, verses are carved on stones along temple paths, and school and national competitions keep the habit alive.

Bathing is the other local ritual. Dogo's public baths are used by residents as much as by visitors, with a code of conduct learned in childhood, and the quarter's inns, sweet shops and evening strolls in cotton yukata belong to the same tradition. Literary tourism runs alongside it: Botchan's name is attached to an antique tram on the city tramway, to three-coloured dumplings and to the city's baseball stadium.

The 88-temple pilgrimage passes straight through the city, and eight of its temples lie within the boundaries, so white-clad walkers are part of ordinary street life and osettai, the custom of giving pilgrims food or small gifts, survives. Ehime is proud of its crafts — indigo-dyed kasuri cotton, Tobe porcelain from the town just to the south — and of its clubs, the Ehime Mandarin Pirates in baseball and Ehime FC in football. People here are considered easygoing by Japanese standards, and the local speech, Iyo-ben, is soft and drawn out.

About 500,000 people live in Matsuyama, making it the largest city on Shikoku and a good deal bigger than the other prefectural capitals. Most of them live on the plain between the castle and the sea, in a spread of low houses and flats that reaches the foothills, with the arcades, offices and department stores of the centre at its core.

The economy is built on administration, retail, health care and education — Ehime University and a medical school are here — along with chemical and paper plants on the coast, the port and a farming belt of mandarin orchards on the hillsides. Ehime grows some of the country's best-known citrus, and juice, jelly and dried peel are made in the city's factories. Tourism, centred on the castle and Dogo, employs many, and the growth of cycling on the Shimanami Kaido has drawn more visitors to the region.

Daily rhythms are those of a mid-sized Japanese city, but slower: trams every few minutes through the centre, school children cycling on the flat streets, shops in the arcades shutting in the early evening while the izakaya fill. Ageing and the drift of young people to Osaka and Tokyo are the persistent worries, along with preparing for a Nankai Trough earthquake and keeping rural bus and rail links to the rest of Ehime running.

Sea bream is the city's fish. Taimeshi in the Matsuyama manner is a whole bream cooked with rice in a pot and then flaked through it, a dish tied to the Inland Sea and distinct from the Uwajima version further south, where raw slices are dressed with a soy and egg sauce and poured over rice. Jakoten, small fish blended to a paste and fried, is a speciality of Uwajima in southern Ehime and is eaten right across it, and the same waters supply octopus, conger and sweet shrimp for the counters at Mitsuhama.

The everyday dish is nabeyaki udon: soft noodles in a sweet, clear broth served in a small aluminium pot, a Matsuyama style that has been sold in the same few shops in the arcades for generations. Goshiki somen, fine wheat noodles dyed in five colours and dried in bundles, is a Matsuyama speciality and as much a gift as a meal.

Sweets are a local strength. Botchan dango, three skewered rice dumplings in green tea, egg and red bean, take their name from Soseki's novel; Matsuyama taruto is a thin sponge rolled around sweet bean paste, said to derive from a Portuguese cake brought through Nagasaki; and Dogo's shops sell both to bathers. Above all there is citrus: mandarins, iyokan, and dozens of crossbred varieties grown on the terraces around the city, squeezed into juice at stands and taps across Dogo and sold by the box in autumn and winter.