History
Tokushima anchors the eastern edge of Shikoku, and much of what defines it — a dye, a whirlpool, a festival — travels further than the prefecture’s modest size would suggest.
Tokushima and the wider world
Tokushima’s Awa-ai indigo dye became one of the more surprising Japanese exports of ideas, if not always goods: when Western visitors arrived in large numbers during the Meiji era, they were struck by how much of the country’s everyday clothing was dyed in the same deep blue, produced in huge quantities in Tokushima. The British scientist Robert William Atkinson, working in Japan in the late 1870s, is widely credited with coining the term “Japan Blue” to describe it — a nickname that stuck in English-language accounts of Japan for decades afterward.
More recently, the Naruto Strait’s dramatic tidal whirlpools — among the largest in the world, generated by the tidal flow between the Pacific and the Seto Inland Sea — lent both their name and their swirling visual pattern to “Naruto,” one of the best-selling manga and anime franchises globally; the whirlpool motif appears directly in the series’ visual branding, even though the story itself isn’t set in Tokushima.
Neighbors: Tokushima and the rest of Shikoku
Tokushima is where most walkers begin the Shikoku Henro, an 88-temple, roughly 1,200-km pilgrimage circuit that loops through all four Shikoku prefectures — a shared religious and cultural thread that ties the whole island together more than any single rivalry between its prefectures.
Getting there and getting around
Tokushima has no shinkansen connection; the fastest route from Osaka or Kobe is by highway bus across the Akashi Kaikyo and Onaruto bridges, roughly 2-2.5 hours. A car or bus is useful for reaching the Iya Valley.
