Takamatsu

The bay that Takamatsu sits on was a natural harbour on the Inland Sea route between the capital region and Kyushu, and the plateau of Yashima above it was fortified in the seventh century with one of the Korean-style mountain fortresses raised after the court's defeat on the continent. In 1185 the shore beneath Yashima was the scene of one of the decisive battles of the Genpei War, when Minamoto forces drove the Taira from their camp and out to sea; the episode is retold in the Tale of the Heike and has kept the hill famous ever since.

The city proper begins in 1588, when Ikoma Chikamasa built a castle with its walls lapped by the sea and laid out a town around it. From 1642 Takamatsu was held by a branch of the Matsudaira, relatives of the ruling Tokugawa, who governed Sanuki province from here for more than two centuries and turned a lakeside villa south of the town into the garden now called Ritsurin, adding to it for roughly a hundred years.

The castle keep was taken down in 1884, and the town became the capital of the new Kagawa Prefecture and the island's administrative centre. Its harbour carried the railway ferry from Uno on Honshu, which made Takamatsu the front door to Shikoku. Much of the built-up area was destroyed by an air raid in July 1945 and rebuilt on a wider grid. The Great Seto Bridge, opened in 1988, ended the ferry's monopoly and reshaped the city's role, and the waterfront it left behind has since been rebuilt as the Sunport district.

Takamatsu's culture is shaped by the sea in front of it and the pilgrimage behind it. White-clad henro walking the 88-temple circuit pass through the eastern suburbs on their way to Yashima-ji and the temples beyond, and the custom of osettai — giving pilgrims food, drink or a small gift — is still practised in Kagawa. Kotohira-gu, the shrine of the sea gods a short way inland, drew pilgrims from all over Japan in the Edo period, and its stairway remains one of the region's set journeys.

The city has an unusually strong connection with modern art and design. Kenzo Tange's prefectural office of 1958 was an early landmark of post-war Japanese architecture, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi's studio and garden in the granite quarrying district of Mure on the city's eastern edge is now a museum, and since 2010 the Setouchi Triennale has used Takamatsu's port as the gateway to island venues, bringing large numbers of visitors to boats that once carried only commuters and freight.

Older crafts survive alongside. Kagawa lacquerware, also called Takamatsu lacquerware, is made in the prefecture, wasanbon sugar is still made by hand there, and Marugame's round paper fans are made nearby. Village kabuki stages recall a tradition of amateur theatre in the farming districts. Locals are direct, informal and proud of their noodles to a degree that outsiders find comic.

About 400,000 people live in Takamatsu, making it the second-largest city on Shikoku after Matsuyama and the island's business centre. Many national companies run their Shikoku branch offices here, and government, banking, retail and logistics employ far more people than manufacturing. The port still handles freight and island traffic, and the surrounding plain grows rice, wheat, olives and vegetables.

The pattern of the day is provincial and steady. Commuters ride the Kotoden or drive in from suburbs that spread across the flat land towards the mountains, the arcades fill at lunchtime and again after work, and many people eat udon for breakfast or lunch without thinking it unusual. The waterfront at Sunport is used for walking, running and school trips as much as for ferries.

Like the rest of Shikoku, the city is ageing and its wider region is losing people, which shows in closed shops at the far ends of the arcades and in thinning bus timetables in the villages. Takamatsu itself has held up better than most of the island, helped by its administrative role and by tourism around the Inland Sea art islands, which has brought foreign visitors to a city that saw very few a generation ago. Water supply — an old problem in a dry prefecture — and disaster preparation for a Nankai Trough earthquake are steady local concerns.

Kagawa calls itself the udon prefecture, and Takamatsu is where most visitors meet Sanuki udon: thick wheat noodles with a firm, almost springy bite, made with local wheat and salt and served in many styles. Kake udon comes in a light dashi broth made from iriko, the local dried sardines; bukkake is dressed with a small amount of concentrated sauce; kamatama mixes noodles straight from the pot with raw egg and soy; zaru udon is cold with a dipping sauce. Many shops are self-service, with customers rinsing their own noodles and picking tempura or rice balls from a counter.

The other local dish is honetsuki-dori, a whole chicken leg seasoned with salt, pepper and garlic and roasted on the bone, first sold in Marugame in the 1950s and now on menus across the prefecture, ordered from an older bird for chew or a young one for tenderness. Fish from the Inland Sea is a constant: sea bream, hamachi yellowtail farmed off the Kagawa coast, sawara mackerel eaten raw in spring, and anago conger eel. Olives from Shodoshima flavour oil and pickles, and some cattle and yellowtail are fed on the pressed olive fruit.

For sweets, wasanbon — a pale, fine-grained sugar made from a local cane and pressed into small moulded shapes — is served with tea, and anmochi zoni, a New Year soup of white miso with a rice cake stuffed with sweet bean paste, is a Kagawa peculiarity that outsiders find hard to believe. Local sake breweries and a growing number of small coffee roasters fill out the rest.