Tokushima Prefecture Trips & Tours

Tokushima is the Shikoku prefecture that Japan's own travellers speak of reverently and international visitors are yet to properly discover. Eighty per cent mountainous, carved through by the wild Yoshino River, it's a landscape of gorges, ancient pilgrim routes and a coastline where loggerhead turtles come ashore under cover of dark. The star turn is the Iya Valley — sometimes called the "Tibet of Japan" — where vine-woven kazurabashi bridges hang 14 metres above the river. Legend says they were built by the defeated Heike clan, who fled here after the 12th-century Genpei War and wove them from mountain vines so they could be cut the moment enemies appeared. The whirlpools of Naruto Strait — some reaching 20 metres across — are equally arresting, best seen by boat or from the glass-floored Uzu no Michi walkway directly above. Back in Tokushima City, don't leave without a bowl of the local ramen — soy-dark and crowned with a raw egg — and a squirt of sudachi, the tart little citrus the prefecture produces almost exclusively for the whole of Japan.