Regions & prefectures
JapanRegions & prefectures
Ehime
Japan’s oldest public baths, a castle on its hill and tangerines everywhere.
- Capital
- Matsuyama
- Status
- Prefecture
- Region
- Shikoku
- Must-see
- The Dōgo Onsen bathhouse
- Local specialty
- Mikan tangerines, taimeshi, jakoten
Dōgo Onsen appears in the Man’yōshū and the Nihon Shoki, making it the country’s oldest documented hot spring, in use for at least fifteen hundred years. Matsuyama gave Japan the poet Masaoka Shiki, who refounded haiku, and serves as the setting of Natsume Sōseki’s novel Botchan. Ehime grows more citrus than any other prefecture, some forty varieties derived from the mikan.
What to see there
Places, dishes and traditions tied to this territory.
In the magazine
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