Cormorant fishing on the Hiji River at dusk — a preserved castle town that most Shikoku visitors miss entirely
Ōzu in Ehime Prefecture, Shikoku, is the kind of town that rewards visitors who peel away from the Dogo Onsen circuit. Its castle (one of 12 original wooden castles remaining in Japan) sits above a bend of the Hiji River, while below, every evening from June to September, the ancient art of ukai — fishing with trained cormorants on the river by torchlight — plays out in wooden boats exactly as it has for centuries. The preserved merchant quarter (Garyu Sanso villa is the architectural masterpiece, a 19th-century villa designed by a carpenter who never left Japan but incorporated Chinese, Japa…
Ōzu developed as a castle town under the Wakisaka and later Katō clans from the 17th century. The castle was rebuilt in 2004 from surviving blueprints in a reconstruction remarkable for using traditional techniques and materials. The Garyu Sanso villa was built between 1907 and 1916 by local merchant Torajiro Kobayashi, who spent 10 years working with a single carpenter to create the complex — the carpenter never used a ruler, relying entirely on his own proportional sense.