Tsuno, Kochi

The road into Tsuno-cho climbs through cedar and broadleaf forest until the trees thin and the ground opens into the limestone plateau of Shikoku Karst. Up here, the air cools noticeably, cattle graze across open grassland, and wind turbines turn slowly above the ridgeline of Godo Kogen. The elevation is not a backdrop — it is the condition of everything that grows and happens here.

The tea grown in these mountains, known as Tsunoyama-cha, owes its character to the sharp difference between cool nights and warm days at altitude. At the roadside station Fuse-ga-saka, jars of it sit alongside Manten-no-Hoshi Daifuku and locally brewed Tsunoyama Beer — small productions that don't travel far. The converted schoolhouse called Mori-no-Sugako serves as a gathering point: part shop, part bathhouse, part inn, the kind of repurposed space that marks a community working with what it has.

The Tsunoyama Koshiki Kagura and the Hanadori Odori — a sword dance tradition of Tosa — are still performed here, rooted in the same mountain villages that produced them. The ruins of Himenono Castle, seat of the Tsuno clan, sit quietly above the valley. And Irazu-yama, a peak that was kept closed during the Edo period as a protected forest, remains dense with natural woodland at the headwaters of the Shimanto River — water that begins here, in the quiet of this highland, before traveling far downstream.