Kochi Hidden Gems

Kochi is the most heavily forested prefecture in Japan — around 84 per cent tree cover — and it faces the open Pacific with nothing between it and the weather. Those two facts explain most of the character. The rivers run clear because the catchments are wooded and largely undammed, and the Shimanto is often called the last clear river in Japan, crossed by low bridges built without railings so that floodwater passes over them rather than tearing them away. The rainfall is enormous and the typhoons arrive first here. Historically the isolation made Tosa a place apart, and Sakamoto Ryoma, the low-ranking samurai who brokered the alliance that ended the shogunate, is from Kochi and is treated locally as something close to a patron saint. The city itself keeps an original castle keep and runs a Sunday street market along the road to it that has been trading for three hundred years.