Shikoku

Leave modernized Japan behind: cross the sea to rushing rivers, sky-high mountains, historic villages, funky cities, local craftworks, brilliant summer festivals, and a thousand terrific sights found only on Shikoku. Child-rearing and small scale, back-breaking agriculture dominate life below the factory-ridden northern coast, but you'll find diverse cuisines, festivals, special products, and even various dialects of Japanese thanks to a long history outside the country's mainstream.

If you didn't know Shikoku's key products were textiles, fish, lumber, and ships, you'd swear they were grizzled old farmers and tiny, adorable children. Every autumn, country people in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and even nineties toil through the harvest, while herds of school children bobble through their rice fields in matching yellow hats. In summer, white-robed o-hemro-san stand out against the green: pilgrims walking Shikoku's famous pilgrimage path, an 88-temple circuit established by the Buddhist saint Kobo Daishi in the 8th century. It takes two or three months to walk, and you can ease a pilgrim's burden by offering o-settai, a few coins or some other charity, as he walks the road to enlightenment.

Shikoku's simple lifestyle may feel exotic to a traveler, but from the local perspective it's visitors who appear exotic and strange. Meeting foreigners still verges on the fantastical for people here, and outside Shikoku's four major cities you may be treated more like a celebrity (or a space alien) than a faceless tourist. Connecting with people will be more personal here than in Tokyo or Kansai, and every encounter can be an adventure: locals on Shikoku will actually shout out loud when they see you—Ah! Gaijin-san!—and welcome you into their towns.

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