Most visitors to Tokushima arrive for the Naruto whirlpools or the Awa Odori festival and leave without discovering what makes the prefecture genuinely extraordinary — the places that don’t appear on the first page of search results and are not yet clogged with tour buses. A hilltop village of stacked farmhouses that looks like it was painted by a Japanese Cézanne. A ropeway that transforms Tokushima City’s modest skyline into something surprisingly beautiful after dark. A paper-making tradition kept alive by a handful of artisans in a valley most Japanese have never heard of. Battlefield sites from one of Japan’s most romanticised military catastrophes. Tokushima’s hidden layer is as rewarding as any of its famous attractions, and often more so.
Ochiai Village — A Hillside Preserved in Time
In the depths of Higashi-Iya (East Iya), reached by a mountain road that takes between two and 2.5 hours from Tokushima City depending on conditions, Ochiai village is one of the most astonishing surviving examples of traditional Japanese mountain settlement. Twenty-eight farmhouses, built during the Edo period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, are stacked in tiers up a hillside at elevations between 390 and 480 metres above the valley floor. The rooflines overlap when viewed from below, each building placed precisely to make use of the limited flat ground on the slope.
The village was designated a National Important Preservation District for Historic Buildings, the same status granted to famous merchant towns like Takayama and Tsumago, but Ochiai receives a fraction of their visitor numbers. On a weekday morning, it is possible to walk through the entire village and encounter only local residents. The combination of the architecture — enormous farmhouses with steeply pitched thatched roofs, stone-walled vegetable gardens, hand-hewn timber gates — and the valley setting, with the river audible far below and the ridgelines above still forested almost to the tops, makes Ochiai one of the most atmospheric places in all of Shikoku.
How to Reach Ochiai
A car is necessary. The nearest train station is Oboke on the JR Dosan Line, and from there a mountain road climbs steeply into East Iya. The drive from Oboke takes approximately 45 minutes. From Tokushima City, plan on 1.5 to two hours each way. Allow at least three hours in the village itself — arriving in the morning to catch the light on the rooftops and staying until the valley fills with the late afternoon shadow is the ideal approach.
Mount Bizan at Night — Tokushima City’s Secret View
Mount Bizan (Bizan means “beautiful mountain” in Chinese-derived Japanese) rises 290 metres above Tokushima City and provides the clearest elevated view of the Yoshino River delta, the city grid, and on clear days the mountains of the Kinki region across the sea. It is reachable in six minutes by ropeway from a station five minutes' walk from Tokushima Station.
The standard tourist literature describes Bizan as a daytime viewpoint, which undersells its best quality: the night view. After dark, the river reflections, the city lights, and the distant darkness of the Seto Inland Sea combine into a panorama that is far more visually compelling than the daytime version. The ropeway runs until 21:00 (last ascent approximately 20:30). The round-trip ropeway fare is ¥1,030 for adults.
The Summit and Surroundings
At the summit, the Tokushima Prefecture Awa Odori Kaikan Bizan Observatory provides a sheltered viewing platform and a small café. On clear autumn evenings, the view extends to Awaji Island and occasionally to the mountains of Hyogo Prefecture. A smaller exhibition on the history of the Awa Odori festival occupies part of the summit building.
Walking back down through the forested slope after a night visit — the path is lit and takes about 20 minutes — is a pleasantly unusual way to end an evening in Tokushima City.
Washi Paper Making in Yamakawa
Tokushima Prefecture has been producing Japanese hand-made paper (washi) since at least the Edo period, and the town of Yamakawa in Yoshinogawa City is one of the last places where the traditional craft is maintained by working artisans using the same tools and techniques as their predecessors. The paper is made from kozo (mulberry) fibres, beaten, suspended in water, and sieved onto wooden frames — a process whose beauty lies in its directness and its dependence on the skill of the maker’s hands.
Visitors can participate in supervised washi paper-making sessions at the Yamakawa Washi Craft Center. The experience typically runs one to two hours and produces a finished sheet of paper that participants can take home. Session fees are modest, typically ¥500 to ¥1,500 depending on the type of paper produced. The workshop is run by practitioners who have been making paper for decades, and watching the full production process — from raw fibre to finished sheet — gives a real sense of how much knowledge is embedded in what appears to be a simple craft.
Yamakawa is accessible from Tokushima City by the JR Tokushima Line to Yamakawa Station, a journey of approximately 50 minutes. The craft centre is a short walk from the station.
The Higashiyama District — Tokushima City’s Old Quarter
On the eastern side of Tokushima City, across the Shinmachi River from the main shopping and business streets, the Higashiyama district preserves a different urban character from the concrete-and-glass majority of the city centre. Several old merchant houses survive along the backstreets, along with a handful of small temples and a walking route that traces the old castle moat system.
The district is best explored on foot in the early morning, when the light comes from behind the Bizan ridge and the streets are quiet. The small temple complexes are genuinely atmospheric at this hour — incense from morning services, the sound of wooden fish drums from within the main halls, moss-covered stone lanterns still holding their evening candles. There are no entrance fees at the temples and no established tourist infrastructure; the Higashiyama district is simply the older face of a city that has largely rebuilt itself around it.
A good route begins at the Tokushima Castle ruins (now a public park with a small museum, admission ¥300) and walks east into the Higashiyama streets before looping back along the Shinmachi River embankment to the city centre. The full circuit takes about two hours at a relaxed pace.
Heike Clan Battlefields and Legends
The Taira (Heike) clan, defeated by the Minamoto at the Battle of Dan-no-Ura in 1185, is one of the defining tragic figures of Japanese classical literature. The defeated Heike warriors who escaped the final naval battle are said to have fled into the most remote mountain regions of Japan, and Tokushima’s Iya Valley is among the most persistently cited of their refuge sites. Local traditions in Iya villages claim descent from Heike survivors, and several sites in the valley are associated with specific figures from the Tale of the Heike.
The most evocative of these is the area around Higashi-Iya, where local legends place a Heike encampment at the most defensible positions on the ridge. Whether historically accurate or not, the physical landscape supports the story completely — it is genuinely impossible to imagine pursuing an army into the Iya Valley in the twelfth century. The narrow approaches, the sheer gorge walls, and the natural defensive quality of the terrain make the legends feel plausible in a way that site-specific Heike traditions elsewhere in Japan often do not.
Komatsushima Fish Market
The port town of Komatsushima, south of Tokushima City on the Pacific coast and accessible in approximately 30 minutes by local train or car, operates a morning fish market that has not been transformed for tourism. This is a working market serving local restaurants and fishmongers. Arrivals before 7:00 will find the stalls active with the previous night’s catch from the Pacific fishing grounds — Pacific saury, yellowtail, various flat fish, and the prized aji (horse mackerel) for which the area is locally known.
The experience is not a spectacle arranged for outsiders but a functional market that happens to be worth visiting for anyone interested in Japanese fisheries culture, the visual variety of deep-sea catch, or simply the experience of seeing how a coastal town starts its day. Several small cafés and a popular local restaurant near the market serve breakfast sets based on the morning’s fresh fish from around ¥700.