Ōzu

Ōzu came after Uchiko, one more stop down the line, and by then Lia and I had stopped expecting much of these small Ehime towns and started simply trusting them. The Hiji river loops through the middle of Ōzu in a wide green curve, and the town folds itself around the water — old wooden houses, a scatter of temples, narrow lanes that end suddenly at the bank. People call it Iyo no ko-Kyōto, “the little Kyoto of Iyo,” which is the sort of thing said about a dozen towns in Japan, but here it did not feel like a stretch. We walked in from the station as the afternoon was softening, and the first thing we saw, standing pale above the rooftops on its rise across the river, was the castle.

The Wooden Castle

Ōzu Castle is the reason to make the effort, and its story is a quiet marvel. The original keep was pulled down in the Meiji era, but in 2004 the town rebuilt it entirely in wood, using the traditional joinery and old photographs and surviving records to get it faithfully right — one of the very few Japanese castle keeps reconstructed properly in timber rather than concrete. Inside it smells of new cypress, and you can see the great pillars and the intricate bracketing exposed, the whole structure standing without a nail.

From the top floor the Hiji river bends away below in both directions, silver against the green hills, and a caretaker pointed out to us where the cormorant boats would set off after dark.

Garyū-sansō

Downriver, on a bluff above a deep pool where the water runs slow and clear, sits Garyū-sansō, a villa built at the turn of the twentieth century by a wax merchant who spared no expense and, evidently, employed craftsmen of real genius. It is small but almost absurdly refined — rooms of dark polished wood looking straight out over the river, a tea house cantilevered above the water, details in the joinery and the sculpted garden that reward every second you spend noticing them.

We sat a long while on the veranda, saying almost nothing, watching the light move on the pool below. Lia said it was the most peaceful room she had stood in all trip, and I knew what she meant.

Cormorant Fishing on the Hiji

We had timed our night in Ōzu, without quite meaning to, for the season of ukai — cormorant fishing, practised here on summer evenings much as it has been for centuries. After dark we joined a low wooden boat that poled out onto the river, and ahead of us the fishermen worked by the light of iron braziers burning at their prows, their trained cormorants diving and surfacing on long cords to catch the small ayu fish drawn to the flames.

It is theatrical and strange and genuinely old, the fire hissing on the black water, the birds slick and quick in the glow, and for once the spectacle entirely earned the trouble of staying up for it.

Getting There

Ōzu sits in western Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku, about thirty-five minutes south of Matsuyama by limited express to Iyo-Ōzu station on the JR Yosan line, and only ten minutes beyond Uchiko, so the two pair easily in a day. From the station the castle and old town are a fifteen-minute walk or a short taxi ride across the river. Cormorant fishing runs on summer evenings, roughly June to September, and must be booked ahead. If you can, stay the night — Ōzu after the day-trippers have gone, with the river running dark under the lit keep, is the version worth having.