Tadotsu, Kagawa

Trains branch here. At Tadotsu Station, the Dosan Line and the Yosan Line diverge — one turning south toward the mountains of Shikoku, the other curving west along the coast. The station itself carries a certain weight: this is where Shikoku's railways began, when the Sanuki Railway opened its first service in 1889. The JR Shikoku Tadotsu Works still operates nearby, a maintenance yard where rolling stock is serviced with the quiet continuity of a craft passed down through generations of railway workers.

The town faces two directions at once. Behind it, the Sanuki Plain spreads flat and agricultural. Ahead, the Seto Inland Sea opens into a scattered archipelago — Takamishima, Sanagivshima, and the other islands that administratively belong to Tadotsu, reachable by ferry, sparsely inhabited, and sitting within the Setonaikai National Park. The water here is not decorative; Tadotsu grew as a port, a junction of sea and land routes, and Tadotsu Shipbuilding still works the waterfront.

Somewhere between the rail yard and the harbor stands the headquarters of Shorinji Kempo, the martial art whose founding organization made this small town its permanent home. It is an unlikely combination — locomotives, shipbuilding, and a martial discipline — yet Tadotsu holds all three without apparent contradiction, each rooted in its own corner of a town that has always traded in movement and transit.