Imabari

Shikoku, Japan · City

The Shikoku end of the Shimanami Kaido, where you set off across the world's longest triple suspension bridge; on land, a castle with a moat full of seawater and the town that makes half of Japan's towels.

The essentials

Getting there

Train — Imabari sits on JR Shikoku's Yosan Line and has a direct limited express from Okayama, the gateway most people use to enter the island: the Shiokaze takes about 2h20 and costs ¥5,830 unreserved (¥3,630 base fare plus a ¥2,200 supplement), running roughly hourly. From Matsuyama it is 35-40 minutes on the same Shiokaze or on the Ishizuchi at ¥1,840 unreserved (¥1,080 base plus a ¥760 supplement); local trains on the same line take over an hour and run infrequently. Setouchi Bus also runs the route in 1h10 for ¥1,200. From Takamatsu, about 2h20 with a change, or direct on some services. The other way in is from the north: Setouchi Bus's Shimanami Liner crosses the bridges to Fukuyama in just under 1h40 for ¥2,800, about 17 services a day with stops on the islands, and it is the fastest way to chain on to Onomichi, Kurashiki or Hiroshima without looping back via Okayama. There is a direct bus from Matsuyama Airport. The town itself is walkable from the station, but the Shimanami islands need a bike, a bus or a car: the Sunrise Itoyama cycle terminal is 20-25 minutes by city bus (Oura line) or 15 by taxi from the station, and the Omishima museums are some 40 km out. A car helps a great deal for the Towel Museum and for Kirosan, but is not essential.

Frequently asked questions about Imabari

What to do in Imabari: 27 activities

• Crossing the Kurushima-Kaikyo Bridge 1.5 h must-see

  4,105 metres, and in fact three suspension bridges chained together (960, 1,515 and 1,570 m) — the world's first triple suspension bridge, completed in 1999. Below runs the Kurushima Strait, one of Japan's three fastest tidal races, with around a thousand vessels a day and a system of illuminated signals telling them which way the current is running. The bike and pedestrian lane is separated from traffic on the north side and open 24 hours; it closes when wind exceeds 15 m/s. Crossing by bike takes 30-40 minutes including the climb up from Itoyama, the longest approach ramp on the whole route; you can also walk it there and back in a little over two hours.

• Oyamazumi Shrine, on Omishima 1.5 h must-see

  This is the head shrine of some ten thousand Yamazumi and Mishima shrines across Japan, dedicated to Oyamazumi-no-kami, god of mountains and of the sea. That explains the rest: for centuries every warrior with something at stake in the Inland Sea — the Minamoto, the Taira, the Murakami, later the lords of Iyo — came here to pray and left his weapons as an offering, which is how this island ended up holding the country's greatest hoard of ancient armour. In the courtyard stands a camphor tree said to be around 2,600 years old, within a camphor grove designated a natural monument. The precinct is free and always open; the shrine is at Miyaura on the western side of Omishima, about three hours by bike from Imabari.

• Riding the Shimanami Kaido from the Imabari end 8 h must-see

  The cycling route, marked by a blue line painted on the road, runs from Imabari to Onomichi across six islands and seven bridges: 70 km by the shortest line, or 87.7 km on Ehime Prefecture's official routing, which detours via the things worth seeing. The climbing is all on the bridges, not the islands: the decks sit about 40 m above the sea, and the Kurushima one at 65 m, reached by long spiral or switchback ramps at a gentle gradient of roughly 3 %, designed so you never have to get off. It is not all segregated path either: plenty of island sections run on ordinary roads shared with traffic, with the blue line simply painted along the shoulder, so stay alert. On a hybrid, reckon 7-9 hours without serious stops; many people split it over two days and sleep on Omishima. The cyclists' bridge toll is currently waived, with the exemption extended to 31 March 2028.

• Renting a bike and dropping it off somewhere else 0.5 h booking

  The Shimanami Japan system runs about ten terminals between Imabari and Onomichi, and the big one on this side is Sunrise Itoyama, right at the foot of the Kurushima bridge (8:00-19:00, 18:00 in winter; roughly 350 bikes). 2026 rates: ¥3,000 a day for a hybrid or city bike (¥1,000 for children), ¥4,000 for a pedal-assist, ¥8,000 for an e-bike and ¥4,000 for a tandem. You can indeed leave the bike at a different terminal, but since the fare revision that one-way drop-off costs an extra ¥1,000 per adult and ¥500 per child, and only applies to hybrids and city bikes: e-bikes and tandems must go back where you got them. The old ¥1,100 deposit has been scrapped. Book online in high season and at weekends.

• The armour museum at Oyamazumi Shrine 1.5 h

  One figure sums it up: roughly 80 % of all the ancient armour and weaponry Japan has designated National Treasure or Important Cultural Property is kept here. It is not a handsome museum — old cases, little English — but nobody else has the contents: armour from the 12th to the 16th century, the suit attributed to Minamoto no Yoshitsune, and the naginata of Tsuruhime, the priest's daughter who by tradition led the island's defence at eighteen. The same ticket covers the maritime museum next door, with the Hayama-maru, the vessel Emperor Showa used for his marine biology research. ¥1,000 (¥800 high-school and university students, ¥400 primary and junior high), open every day of the year 9:00-16:30 with last entry at 16:00, so do not leave it to the end of the day.

• Charcoal-grilled seafood at Yoshiumi Iki-iki-kan 1.5 h

  The Yoshiumi roadside station, right at the foot of the Kurushima bridge on Oshima, is above all a grill: they hand you a charcoal brazier (shichirin) on a terrace facing the strait and you cook your own scallops, oysters, prawns, squid and whatever came in that day, caught in the churning water just there. They also do kaisen-don and sea-bream rice. It is the classic lunch stop for anyone riding the first leg out of Imabari, and it works well with children. The shop is open 9:00-17:00 and the restaurant 10:00-16:00 (last orders 15:00), essentially every day of the year; at weekends there is a queue, so get there early.

• Doing just a section: the bridge bus, or the boat 2 h

  You do not have to ride all 70 km. Setouchi Bus's Shimanami Liner links Imabari with Fukuyama along the expressway in a little under 1h40 (¥2,800, around 17 services a day) and stops on the islands — Oshima, Hakatajima, Omishima, Setoda — so you can run the trip backwards: bus out to Omishima, see the shrine, come back. A warning about bikes: the Liner only takes folding bikes in a carrying bag, with limited space, not a full-size rental. The other option is the sea: roughly six sailings a day leave Imabari port for Munakata on Omishima, split between the municipal ferry and the Omishima Blue Line company, and both carry bicycles for a surcharge (the passenger boat takes only ten, first come first served). The two run separate timetables and are cancelled in bad weather, so check on the day. The combination that works best is to ride only the Imabari-Oshima leg, the genuinely spectacular one, and come back by local bus.

• Imabari Castle, its moat filled with seawater 1.5 h

  Todo Takatora, the great castle engineer of his day, built it between 1602 and 1604 hard against the shore, with a moat connected to the sea by sluice gates: it rises and falls with the tide and has sea bream and mullet swimming in it. It is one of Japan's three saltwater castles, along with Takamatsu and Nakatsu. Ships sailed straight into the compound, which is the whole point — this was not a mountain fortress but a fortified harbour. Be aware that the present keep is concrete, put up in 1980 as an educated guess, since no drawing of the original survives; what is authentic are the cyclopean walls and the layout. Open 9:00-17:00 (last entry 16:30), closed 29-31 December, ¥520, and free for under-18s. About 20 minutes' walk from Imabari Station.

• Imabari towels, at the flagship store 1.5 h

  Imabari has been making towels since 1894 and now accounts for roughly half of all Japanese production: by a distance, the capital of the trade. What sets it apart is the very soft water of the Soja river, which allows dyeing and bleaching with fewer chemicals and leaves the cotton looser — hence the famous five-second test, which requires a scrap of towel to sink unaided in a glass of water within that time to carry the mark. The shared red, blue and white brand dates from 2006 and was designed by Kashiwa Sato. The flagship store is inside the Texport Imabari complex (5-14-3 Higashimon-machi), redesigned by Sato in 2017: some 20,000 items across 400 lines from around thirty certified brands, with the Imabari Towel LAB next door, where they run the glass test and keep looms working alongside a weaving workshop. Open 9:00-18:00 (the shop from 9:30) and closed only 30 December to 3 January.

• Imabari yakitori, pressed on a hot plate 2 h

  Here yakitori is done differently: no skewer and no charcoal — the chicken is pressed flat on a hot iron plate with a weight, so it cooks fast and comes out crisp outside and juicy within. The cut to order is kawa, the skin, rolled and pressed until it is like a savoury toffee. The local explanation is purely industrial: the shipyards and towel mills ran shifts, and people had to be fed quickly. Imabari bills itself as a yakitori town, with a good dozen places clustered around the station and the Honmachi district, almost all open evenings only.

• Kirosan Observatory, above the Kurushima bridge 1.5 h

  From the 307-metre summit of Mt Kiro on Oshima you get the whole triple Kurushima bridge, the strait and, beyond it, Shikoku. Kengo Kuma designed the observatory in 1994, and its trick is that you can barely see it: it is buried in the hillside and replanted on top, so you climb up through a slot in the concrete and step out onto the platform without the mountain's profile having been spoilt. Free, always open. Access is the catch: by bike it is a brutal 2 km climb with double-digit gradients, nothing like the gentle bridge ramps; by car it is ten minutes up from the Oshima-Minami exit. Sunset is the hour to be there.

• Onmaku, the town's own festival 4 h only one weekend in August

  On one August weekend — 8-9 in 2026, 2-3 in 2025, so check the date each year — Imabari throws itself into Onmaku, which in the local dialect means something like 'all out'. Two days of street dancing through the centre with neighbourhood and company teams competing with their own choreographies, shimanami-daiko drumming and tsugi-jishi, the lion dance in which children are hoisted onto shoulders to form towers three and four tiers high, an Ehime speciality. The second night closes with some ten thousand fireworks fired from the harbour between 20:00 and 20:50, the biggest display in the prefecture; the paid seating sells out weeks ahead, but it is free to watch from the waterfront. The centre is closed to traffic and the trains back to Matsuyama are packed.

• The Murakami Pirates Museum, on Oshima 1.5 h

  The Murakami of Noshima were not quite pirates: they controlled the straits, levied tolls and piloted ships through, and at times decided sixteenth-century naval battles. A Portuguese Jesuit called them 'the greatest pirate in Japan' and the name stuck. The museum, at Miyakubo, shows armour, war letters and finds from the excavations on the island fortress of Noshima, visible from the window. There is a VR experience for ¥500 and you can try on armour for free, which works very well with children. Open 9:00-17:00 (last entry 16:30), closed Mondays (or the following day if a public holiday) and 29 December to 3 January; ¥310, free for under-18s.

• Tidal-current boat through the Kurushima Strait 1 h

  Fifty minutes on a small boat that slips under the piers of the triple bridge, rounds the island fortress of Noshima and runs up to the whirlpools and current lines thrown up by one of Japan's three fastest tidal races. You see the bridge from below, a perspective you get no other way, and the shipyards into the bargain. It leaves from Shimizu-minato in Yoshiumi (Oshima), with tickets sold next door at the Yoshiumi Iki-iki-kan roadside station: ¥1,800 adults, ¥900 primary-school children, departures roughly 9:00 to 16:00. The current runs hardest at spring tides, so check a tide table before picking your slot.

• Yakibuta tamago meshi, the town's dish 1 h

  A bowl of rice covered with char siu-style roast pork and topped with one or two fried eggs with runny yolks, the lot doused in the sweet roasting sauce. It started in the 1960s as staff food in Imabari's Chinese restaurants — the cooks ate it standing up, with no time to sit — and worked its way onto the menu; today around a hundred places in town serve it and there is an official dish association. The two benchmarks are Hakurakuten and Shigematsu Hanten, both Chinese restaurants, both with a queue at lunchtime. It runs ¥800-1,000 and is the cheapest and most filling thing you can eat here after a day on the bike.

• Hakatajima and Hakata salt 1.5 h

  Hakata-no-Shio is Japan's best-selling table salt and it came out of these islands, where salt was made in beach evaporation pans from the Edo period, working the sun and the currents; when the state salt monopoly was liberalised, the local cooperative revived the method using seawater from the strait. The company's plant, which is now on Omishima rather than Hakatajima, can be visited free 9:00-16:00 (reception until 15:30), closed on non-holiday Wednesdays and over Obon, with no booking needed unless you are a party of ten or more: you watch the whole process through viewing windows, and they sell a soft serve with salt flakes scattered over it. On Hakatajima, the island that gives the salt its name, the stop is the Marine Oasis Hakata roadside station, famous for its salt ice cream, and nearby is the Funaori-seto, a channel so narrow and so fast that the name says it 'snaps boats in half'. Production stops at 15:00, so arrive late and you will see the plant with the line idle.

• Hot spring and sauna by the station after the ride 1.5 h

  Shimanami Onsen Kisuke no Yu is a couple of blocks from Imabari Station and it is where a lot of people end up after getting off the bike. It is a real hot spring, not just a hot bath: pools at several temperatures, an outdoor bath, a low-temperature sauna and a lounge with recliners, plus a capsule hotel upstairs if you want to sleep on the spot. The morning bath runs 6:00-10:00 at ¥750 on weekdays and ¥800 on holidays, and normal hours are 10:00 to midnight at ¥850 and ¥900 (last entry 23:15); children ¥300. In sweaty kit, with the train back to Matsuyama still ahead of you, it is the obvious answer.

• Ken Iwata Mother and Child Museum 1 h

  A former village kindergarten that Toyo Ito turned into an open-air museum: a circular courtyard open to the sky, in which stand the mother-and-child sculptures of Ken Iwata, who donated his work to Imabari. There is no roof and no glass between the piece and the viewer, and as the light shifts through the day the place shifts with it. Half an hour does it, and it tends to exceed expectations. It is on Omishima a few minutes from the Toyo Ito museum, open 9:00-17:00, closed Mondays (or Tuesday if the Monday is a holiday) and 27-31 December, ¥310 (¥160 students, free under 18).

• Kurushima sea bream and the fish of Iyo 1.5 h

  Ehime is Japan's largest producer of sea bream, and the fish from the Kurushima Strait has a reputation of its own: the current runs so hard that the bream swims against it all day and comes out with firm flesh. It is eaten as sashimi, as taimeshi — rice cooked with the whole fish on top — and in the simplest coastal version, grilled with salt. Alongside it sits Ehime's jakoten, a fried cake of small fish ground up bones and all, eaten hot and freshly made, sold in any market or roadside station here. In the restaurants around Imabari harbour and on the islands, this is what to order.

• Nankobo, temple 55, in the middle of town 1 h

  Six of the 88 temples of the Shikoku pilgrimage lie within Imabari — numbers 54 to 59 — and number 55, Nankobo, is a ten-minute walk from the station, right in the middle of town. It is the only one on the circuit whose name ends in '-bo' rather than '-ji', because it was not a freestanding temple but the monastery that administered Oyamazumi Shrine on Omishima; when the Meiji government separated Buddhism and Shinto by law, it moved here. Almost everything burned in the 1945 air raid and only the Daishi-do survived. It is a good place to watch henro at close quarters: they arrive in the white jacket, the sedge hat and the staff that represents Kobo Daishi, chant two sutras and have their book stamped for ¥300-500. Free to enter.

• Seawater bathing at Mare Grassia Omishima 1.5 h

  It is not an onsen, and that should be said plainly: there is no hot spring here, just seawater pumped in, filtered and heated, in the French thalassotherapy tradition, with massage jets, an exercise pool, a sauna and an outdoor bath facing the sunset over the Inland Sea. After a day of bridges it is exactly what your legs need. Swimwear in the pool area, none in the indoor baths. It sits in Miyaura, five minutes from Oyamazumi Shrine. Open 10:00-20:00 (last entry 19:30), closed Wednesdays; ¥700 adults, ¥350 children, ¥560 for over-65s.

• Senyuji, temple 58, up the mountain 2.5 h

  About 300 metres up Mt Sarugadake, with the Imabari plain, the harbour and the Kurushima Strait laid out below: the best viewpoint on this stretch of the pilgrimage, and the price is a long, steep two-kilometre climb either by narrow road or up the old stone path. What makes Senyuji special is that it keeps a shukubo, pilgrims' lodging, with a shojin ryori vegetarian dinner, run by a priest known for sitting down to talk with whoever turns up. You can stay without being a pilgrim by phoning ahead. It is the stop that dispels the idea that the circuit is a tourist formality: anyone who walks up arrives wrecked, and that is rather the point.

• Swimming on the island beaches 2.5 h

  The Shimanami islands have genuine bathing beaches, not just coastline. Omishima's two official ones are Utena, the island's largest, with a campsite right behind it, ¥100 showers, toilets and changing rooms, and Sakari, smaller and quieter, on the north side, where people also fish and gather shellfish at low tide. The Inland Sea is warm and sheltered, with no surf, which makes it very good with children; the caveat is that the currents between the islands are strong and you should stay inside the marked area. The official season runs from early July to the end of August, and outside it the facilities are shut even though the beach is still there.

• The Tatara Bridge and the Omishima park 1 h

  The Tatara links Omishima with Ikuchijima and marks the Ehime-Hiroshima border in the middle of its span. When it opened in 1999 its 1,480 metres made it the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world, and it remains the most photographed sight on the route after the Kurushima. At the foot of the towers there is a spot where you clap and the sound ricochets up the cables with a strange chirp — the 'singing dragon'; wooden clappers hang there for you to try. Beside it, on the Omishima side, is the Tatara Shimanami Park roadside station, with a viewpoint, island citrus and ice cream: the obligatory halfway stop.

• Tokoro Museum Omishima 1 h

  A small contemporary sculpture museum stepped down a hillside towards the Inland Sea, so that works by Giacomo Manzu, Noe Katz or Gianni Colombo are always seen against the islands. The café terrace at the bottom is half the reason to come up. It is about the most pleasant hour you can spend on Omishima in good weather. Open 9:00-17:00, closed Mondays (or Tuesday if the Monday is a holiday) and 27-31 December, ¥310 (¥160 students, free under 18). It is at Urado, a short walk from the Toyo Ito museum.

• Towel Museum ICHIHIRO 2 h

  A towel factory turned into something hard to classify: working looms and thread on view, tapestries and pictures made of towelling, a whole room of Moomin characters in terry cloth, a European rose garden, shops and several restaurants. It is knowingly kitsch and works very well with children. It is at Asakura, some 20-25 minutes by car from central Imabari — same municipality, but out of town and poorly served by public transport, so in practice you need a car or a taxi. Open 9:30-18:00; the shops, gardens and restaurants are free and you only pay for the gallery section, around ¥1,000.

• Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture 1.5 h

  Toyo Ito, the 2013 Pritzker laureate, built his own museum on a headland on Omishima facing the sea, and the two buildings explain themselves: the Steel Hut, a black faceted steel box holding the exhibition on his work, and the Silver Hut, a reconstruction of the house he built for himself in Tokyo in 1984, now used as a workshop space. Ito has been involved in rural revitalisation projects on the island for years, so the museum is not a parachute drop — it belongs here. Open 9:00-17:00, closed Mondays (or Tuesday if the Monday is a holiday) and 27-31 December, ¥840 (¥420 students, free under 18).

What only happens on specific dates

• Onmaku, the town's own festival one weekend in August

Chains well with

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