History
Kochi is remote and mountainous even by Shikoku standards, cut off from the rest of the island by a mountain range — a geography that may help explain why it produced one of the most independent-minded, and most beloved, figures in modern Japanese history.
Kochi and the wider world
Sakamoto Ryoma was a low-ranking samurai from Kochi who came to believe, earlier and more completely than most of his contemporaries, that Japan needed to adopt Western ships, weapons, and political ideas to avoid the fate of other Asian countries being colonized by Western powers. He purchased Western arms for allied domains, drafted an early proposal for a parliamentary system of government, and — in an image still widely reproduced today — was famously photographed wearing Western leather boots with his traditional samurai clothing, a small but pointed signal of where he thought Japan needed to go. His most consequential act was diplomatic rather than technological: in 1866, he secretly brokered an alliance between Satsuma (modern Kagoshima) and Choshu (modern Yamaguchi), two rival domains whose combined military strength made overthrowing the shogunate realistic for the first time. Ryoma was assassinated in Kyoto in November 1867, on his 33rd birthday by the old lunar calendar, just weeks before the shogunate formally surrendered power — never seeing the country he’d helped remake. He remains one of the most consistently popular figures in Japanese public opinion polls about admired historical figures, over 150 years later.
Neighbors: Kochi, Kagoshima, and Yamaguchi
Ryoma’s Satsuma-Choshu alliance directly connects Kochi’s history to two other prefectures on this site — Yamaguchi (Choshu) and, further along in Kyushu, Kagoshima (Satsuma) — three separate corners of Japan whose local histories all converge on the same few years in the 1860s.
Getting there and getting around
Kochi has no shinkansen connection; Kochi Ryoma Airport has domestic flights, and Kochi Station is reached from Okayama by limited express train in about 2.5 hours. A car is useful for reaching the Shimanto River area in the prefecture’s rural west.
