4 Best Sights in Tokushima, Shikoku

If you miss summer's Awa Odori dance festival, you can still get a dose at this museum and theater. Odori means "dance," and silk-robed professionals perform the famous local step here nightly. But shine your shoes: when the troupe leader starts talking to the audience, he's looking for volunteers. Thankfully, it's an easy dance. You might get a prize for participating, and one special award goes to the biggest fool on the floor—this honor is a staple of the festival, and it's not always the foreigners who win. The best show is at 8 pm. Arrive early and browse the gift shop or treat yourself to a ropeway ride up the mountain for a lovely city view. The third floor of the building is a small museum dedicated to the Awa Odori Festival.

Trek out to this paper museum, also known as Awa Washi Kaikan, to make your own postcards and browse the phenomenal gift shop, which stocks everything from sheets of softer-than-silk wrapping paper to peerless parasols. The trip here by train takes 55 minutes to Awa-Yamakawa Station (or 33 minutes by the infrequent limited express), then you walk 15 minutes to the hall. It's easier to rent a car and make the one-hour drive, especially if you are continuing on to the Iya Valley.

You can hear the thunderous roar of the giant tidal whirlpools at Naruto Kaikyo (the Naruto Straits) long before you see them. When they come into sight, the contrast between peaceful sky and furious, frothing sea is striking. The whirlpools are formed when the changing tides force a huge volume of water through the narrow, rocky bottleneck. A glass-bottom promenade called Uzu-no-michi overlooks the pools from 45 meters (148 feet) up, though even safely behind glass it's sweat-inducing if you don't like heights, especially when the promenade vibrates as trains rattle over the bridge above. The view, however, is even better from the deck of a tour boat. A few companies with different-size vessels offer rides that cost between ¥1,500 and ¥2,500, but all of them are exhilarating. Two of the best boats are the Wonder Naruto and the smaller Aqua Eddy, both run by Naruto Kankou Kisen. The tide table on the promenade's website shows when the pools will be at their best.

About 1 km (½ mile) before buses from Naruto and Tokushima reach Naruto Park, they stop at this impressive and bewildering ceramic art museum. Its founders commissioned more than 1,000 faithful reproductions of Western-art masterpieces on ceramic panels, the concept being that while Picasso's painting Guernica or Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling may fade with time, ceramic reproductions of them will live on forever. Exhibits are arranged by era, from antiquity to modern times, and it's all there, from a Pompeian banquet scene to Rembrandt's self-portraits to Warhol's Marilyn x 100. Cumulatively, the artworks are a bit overwhelming, though certainly not forgettable. You won't forget the price either. The lofty admission price isn't for someone with a mere passing interest in art.