Naruto

Shikoku, Japan · Town / small city

Where the Inland Sea and the Pacific empty into each other four times a day, throwing up the largest tidal whirlpools in the world - which are not always there. They depend on the tide and the lunar cycle, so you check the calendar before you go. Next door sits a museum holding a thousand famous paintings reproduced full-size in ceramic, and the prisoner-of-war camp where Japan first heard Beethoven's Ninth.

The essentials

Getting there

Train + bus — Naruto is the terminus of a short branch line, the JR Naruto Line, and getting there is easy but not fast. From Tokushima there are through trains (services from Tokushima join the branch at Ikenotani without a change): about 40 minutes and ¥430, roughly one train an hour and sometimes less in the mid-afternoon; if you do have to change at Ikenotani it is a cross-platform connection. From Okayama, the gateway most people use to enter Shikoku, the sensible route is the Marine Liner rapid to Takamatsu (55-60 minutes, about ¥1,660 unreserved), then the Uzushio limited express to Ikenotani (just under an hour) and a local train down the branch to Naruto (15-20 minutes): 2.5 to 3 hours in all, roughly ¥4,500-5,000. No limited express runs onto the branch - the Uzushio stops at Ikenotani and from there it is one- or two-car local trains. From Kansai the highway bus often beats the train: buses from Osaka, Kobe and Kansai Airport towards Tokushima cross the Naruto bridge and stop at Kosoku Naruto (about 2 hours from Osaka, 1h40 from Kobe, around ¥4,100-4,300), but that stop sits on the expressway and you then need a local bus or taxi. The detail that ruins most plans: Naruto Station is nowhere near the whirlpools. Naruto Park, with the Uzu-no-michi walkway and the Otsuka Museum, is about 7 km north, reached by Tokushima Bus from the station in 20-25 minutes for ¥390, roughly hourly, with the last services in the mid-afternoon - check the return times before you board. The German House and temples 1 and 2 lie in the opposite direction, towards Bando, on a different bus route. With a car the whole lot fits into one morning and there is paid parking at Naruto Park; without one, the day is built around the bus timetable.

Frequently asked questions about Naruto

What to do in Naruto: 26 activities

• Otsuka Museum of Art 4 h must-see

  Be clear what this is: there is not a single original here. It holds 1,095 masterpieces from more than 190 museums in twenty-six countries, reproduced at full size on ceramic panels with the colour fired in so it lasts about a thousand years - which is why you can touch them, photograph them freely and display them outdoors. Admission is ¥3,300 for adults at the door (¥3,160 in advance), ¥2,200 for university students and ¥550 for schoolchildren; open 9:30-17:00 with ticket sales until 16:00, closed Mondays (Tuesday if the Monday is a holiday). You enter by a 40-metre escalator cut into the hillside because nearly the whole building is buried in it, and the full route is about 4 kilometres: budget half a day and wear decent shoes.

• Uzu-no-michi walkway beneath the Onaruto Bridge 1 h must-see

  A 450-metre corridor built inside the structure of the Onaruto Bridge, with glass panels in the floor some 45 metres above the strait: you lean over and the water boils past underneath. Admission is ¥510 for adults, ¥410 for middle and high school students and ¥260 for primary schoolchildren; it opens 9:00-18:00 from March to September (last entry 17:30), 9:00-17:00 from October to February (last entry 16:30) and 8:00-19:00 during Golden Week and the summer holidays, and closes on the second Monday of March, June, September and December. Check the tide calendar on its website (uzunomichi.jp, English version available) before you go: it marks spring-tide days in red, medium tides in blue and neap tides in black, and gives the peak times of the northward and southward currents; the good window is two hours either side at spring tide, ninety minutes at medium tide and only one hour at neap tide. Spring tides fall at new and full moon, and the best of the year are from late March to late April and from late September to late October.

• Wonder Naruto and Aqua Eddy whirlpool boats 1 h must-see

  Uzushio Kankosen runs two boats from Naruto's sightseeing port: the Wonder Naruto, large and steady, ¥1,800 for adults and ¥900 for primary schoolchildren (¥2,000 and ¥1,000 from January), about 30 minutes, every 40 minutes between 9:00 and 16:20, no booking needed; and the Aqua Eddy, small and fast, with an observation room below the waterline, ¥2,400 for adults and ¥1,200 for children, about 25 minutes, every half hour between 9:15 and 16:15, booking compulsory because it holds only 46 people. The Wonder Naruto's upper deck is ¥1,000 extra. A boat puts you right on top of the whirlpool, but the operator itself warns that on some departures there is nothing to see: pick your sailing from their tide table, not the other way round.

• Naruto German House 1.5 h

  The museum that tells what happened at the Bando prisoner-of-war camp between 1917 and 1920: nearly a thousand German soldiers captured at Tsingtao whom the camp commandant, Matsue Toyohisa, allowed to publish a newspaper, form an orchestra, run a bakery and even lay out a football pitch, and who on 1 June 1918 performed Beethoven's Ninth in full for the first time in Japan. Open 9:30-17:00 (last entry 16:30), closed on the fourth Monday of each month and from 28 to 31 December, ¥400 for adults and ¥100 for schoolchildren. Take the Oasa bus line from Naruto Station to the Doitsukan stop, or walk about 25 minutes from Bando Station.

• Ryozenji, temple number 1 of the 88 1 h

  This is where the Shikoku 88-temple pilgrimage begins: 1,200 kilometres, about 45 days on foot or ten by bus. The shop beside the car park, the same counter that stamps the books, sells the pilgrim's kit - the white jacket (hakui), the conical hat, the staff that represents Kobo Daishi and the stamp book - for roughly ¥10,000-20,000 for the full set. It opens 7:00-17:00 every day of the year and entry is free. It is about a ten-minute walk from Bando Station on the Kotoku Line, and you will see pilgrims learning the order of the ritual right here: wash, ring the bell, leave your name slip, recite the sutra, and only then ask for the stamp.

• Sea bream from the Naruto Strait 1.5 h

  Naruto-dai is sea bream that has spent its life swimming against a twenty-kilometre-an-hour current, which leaves the flesh firm and the tail bent upwards; fishmongers can pick it out on sight. The peak season is spring, when the spawning fish known as sakura-dai arrive. It is eaten raw, salt-grilled whole, or as taimeshi, rice cooked with the fish on top, in the restaurants around the port and Naruto Park; a lunch set runs ¥2,000-3,500 and the good places tend to close mid-afternoon and not open in the evening.

• The Sistine Chapel and the recreated spaces at the Otsuka 1.5 h

  What justifies the museum is not the individual paintings but the rooms rebuilt whole on the lowest floor: the Sistine Chapel with its frescoes complete from floor to ceiling, the crypt of St Peter's, the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, the church of St Nicholas at Kastoria and Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel, all at the dimensions of the originals. Seeing them one after another lets you compare vaults and scales in a way no real journey allows, and the Sistine Chapel has hosted concerts and New Year's Eve broadcasts. There is nothing extra to pay - it is all covered by the general ticket - but if you are short of time, start here and leave the chronological galleries for last.

• Gokurakuji, temple number 2 0.75 h

  Just 1.4 kilometres from Ryozenji along a back road with the pilgrimage's red arrows painted on posts and walls, the second temple has a pond garden and a cedar called Chomei-sugi, traditionally attributed to Kobo Daishi, which people petition for extra years of life. This is where many pilgrims realise what the walk is actually going to be like: no loudspeakers, no admission fee, stamp ¥300. It also has a shukubo where pilgrims can stay, bookable by phone.

• Hot-spring baths overlooking the strait 1.5 h

  On the tip of Oge Island, around Naruto Park, a handful of hotels have their own hot springs and open-air baths looking out at the strait and the bridge, and several take day bathers: the Naruto Grand Hotel Kaigetsu charges ¥1,300 for adults and ¥650 for children from age 3 to sixth grade, 12:00-21:00, with a panoramic bath on the eighth floor and a rooftop open-air pool. This is not a hot-spring village in the classic sense - they are big hotels from the era of corporate group travel - but nobody else has that view from the water at sunset. Phone first: when the hotel is full they close the baths to day visitors.

• Naruto Park viewpoints 1.5 h

  The park covering the tip of Oge Island has several free viewpoints scattered through the pine woods, and they are the way to see the strait without paying anything: Senjojiki, right above the bridge approach, with food stalls and the widest panorama; Ochaen, quieter; and Magosaki, the lowest and closest to the water. This is where the mechanics click: the Inland Sea and the Pacific can sit a metre and a half apart in level, and all that water has to squeeze through a 1.3-kilometre gap at 13-15 km/h, or up to 20 km/h at spring tide, with the whirlpools forming along the edge where the fast jet rubs against still water. From land they look small - ten to twenty metres on a good day. The whole circuit takes a little over an hour on foot along paths with steps.

• Naruto wakame seaweed 1 h

  The wakame that grows in these currents is the most prized in Japan and you can taste why: the blade is thick and springy rather than limp. The harvest runs from late winter into early spring, and in February and March you see the cultivation ropes offshore and people hanging the seaweed to dry along the coast road. Buy it salted at the Kurukuru Naruto roadside station and in the shops by the port; in restaurants it turns up in miso soup, flash-cooked shabu-shabu style and in the local ramen. Beware of imitations: the Naruto name is widely faked, so check the origin on the label.

• Naruto's Beethoven's Ninth concert 3 h booking only the first Sunday of June

  Since 1982 the city has marked that 1 June 1918 with an annual performance of the Ninth, held on the first Sunday of June and sung by some six hundred people - a choir of residents of all ages who rehearse for months, joined by visiting choirs. Mind the venue: the Naruto Cultural Hall has been closed since March 2021 and does not reopen until June 2027, so for now the concert is held in the gymnasium of Naruto University of Education. This is a civic occasion rather than a tourist show; book ahead and confirm the date on the city website.

• Oasahiko Shrine and the German Bridge 1.5 h

  The ichinomiya, the highest-ranking shrine of the old province of Awa, approached along an avenue of cedars and with a sacred camphor tree over a thousand years old, 8.3 metres around and 22 metres tall, protected as a municipal natural monument. Behind it, in the shrine's own Maruyama park, stand the German Bridge and the Megane Bridge: stone arches the Bando prisoners built in their free time, using the technique of their own country, as a parting gift to the locals. Entry is free and it is a short walk from the German House, so the two fit into one morning; at New Year it fills with people from all over the prefecture.

• Remains of the Bando prisoner-of-war camp 1 h

  A few minutes' walk from the German House, in the park known as Doitsu-mura, stands what survives of the camp: barrack foundations, a well, an oven and the cemetery with the headstones of the prisoners who died here, which the people of Bando have kept tended for a century. It is a quiet place with barely any English signage, so it makes more sense after the museum than before. The camp's records have been put forward for UNESCO's Memory of the World register; access is free and unrestricted.

• The Otani pottery kilns 2 h booking

  In the Otani district, on the way to the German House, a handful of family kilns have been making Otani ware for more than 230 years - a nationally designated traditional craft since 2003: iron-rich local clay with a rough surface and a metallic sheen and, above all, huge jars for indigo dyeing, thrown by two people using the nerokuro, a wheel one of them turns with their feet while lying on their back. Several workshops have shops and run wheel-throwing or painting classes for around ¥2,500-4,000, bookable in advance, with the fired piece shipped on weeks later. You can also see the stepped wood-fired climbing kilns, among the largest in Japan for the size of what they fire.

• Uzushio Kisen fast boats from Kameura 0.5 h

  The second operator leaves from Kameura port at the foot of Naruto Park rather than from the city's main sightseeing port: 86-seat fast boats that reach the strait in three minutes and make the whole round trip in about twenty, departing every half hour from 8:00 to 16:30, ¥1,600 for adults and ¥800 for primary schoolchildren, no booking needed. It is the option if you are staying or eating up at the park, and the earlier starter of the two, which matters on days when the good tide falls first thing. At spring tide it throws plenty of spray: put the camera away.

• Walking the first stretch of the 88-temple trail 3 h Itano · 25 min

  If you want a taste of the pilgrimage without signing up for 1,200 kilometres, the opening stretch is the easiest of the whole circuit: flat, well waymarked, through rice fields and villages. Ryozenji to Gokurakuji is 1.4 km, on to Konsenji (temple 3, already in the town of Itano) another 2.6 km, and to Dainichiji (temple 4) about 5 km more, with Kotoku Line stations along the way so you can turn back whenever you like. Carry water and coins for the stamps, greet the henro you pass, and don't cut past them on the inside: the path is shared, not raced.

• A Tokushima Vortis match 3 h booking

  The prefecture's football club plays at the Pocari Sweat Stadium inside Naruto's Otsuka sports park, not in Tokushima city: it is the team of one small prefecture, family-friendly, with tickets from around ¥2,000-3,000 bought online. It is a 25-minute walk or a five-minute taxi from Naruto Station, and on match days shuttle buses run from the station timed to the trains. The Japanese season runs February to December: check the fixture list first, because in Shikoku a match is one of the few things that happens in the late afternoon and evening.

• Eskahill and the Mount Naruto observatory 1 h

  A covered escalator 68 metres long that climbs 34 vertical metres in three minutes to a rooftop with a 360-degree panorama over the strait, the bridge and Awaji Island; on a clear day you can pick out Wakayama and Shodoshima. It costs ¥400 return for adults and ¥100 for schoolchildren, open 9:00-17:00. It is the easy option with children, a pushchair or limited mobility; if you have the legs, the park's footpaths climb to the neighbouring viewpoints for free.

• Kurukuru Naruto roadside station 1 h

  Naruto's michi-no-eki, three minutes by car from the expressway exit, is the destination's practical stop: a farmers' market with wakame, naruto-kintoki sweet potatoes, lotus root and fish from the strait, plus an oyster kitchen, a seafood-rice diner, a bakery and a sweet-potato ice cream counter. Open 9:00-17:00 every day of the year, with 268 parking spaces. It is where to buy edible souvenirs without museum-shop prices, but it is built for drivers: a long way on foot from Naruto Station.

• Myokenzan Park and Muya Castle 1.5 h

  The hill above Naruto's old quarter, about twenty minutes on foot from the station, carries a mock castle keep built on the site of Muya fortress, one of those the Hachisuka clan maintained across Awa province; since 2016 it has served as a civic centre and disaster-response base called Toride Naruto, and entry is free. The view reaches the strait and Awaji Island. In spring this is where locals come for hanami, with paper lanterns and plastic sheets and not a tourist in sight, and the park has Pokémon-decorated manhole covers people come to hunt down.

• Naruto-kintoki sweet potato and lotus root 1 h

  The sand dunes along this coast produce naruto-kintoki, a sweet potato with intensely red skin and very sweet, dry flesh, harvested from August to November and eaten here roasted, as tempura and in sweets; it also turns up as ice cream and cake at the Kurukuru Naruto roadside station. The flooded fields you pass on the train to Naruto are lotus: Tokushima is among Japan's top producers and Naruto accounts for much of it, so local menus almost always include it sliced and fried or in tempura.

• Onaruto Bridge Memorial Museum Eddy 1 h

  Next to the walkway entrance, a small museum about how the Onaruto Bridge was built - it opened to traffic in June 1985 - with models, a flight simulator over the strait and explanations of why the whirlpools form that genuinely help you read what you see afterwards. ¥620 for adults, ¥410 for middle and high school students and ¥260 for primary schoolchildren, 9:00-17:00 (last entry 16:30), open every day of the year, and the combined ticket with the walkway costs ¥900 for adults instead of ¥1,130. In rain or at neap tide it is the park's best fallback.

• The Naruto Skyline and Shihomi viewpoint 1.5 h

  The Naruto Skyline runs high across Shimada and Oge islands, linking Naruto Park with the city; from the Shihomi viewpoint you take in Uchinoumi bay, the cultivation rafts and, beyond them, the Onaruto Bridge. It is a twenty-minute detour by car or bike that almost nobody makes, but it explains the geography better than any information panel: you grasp why all that water has to squeeze through a 1.3-kilometre gap. Not practical without a car.

• The Onaruto Bridge lit up 1 h

  After dark the Onaruto Bridge is floodlit, changing colour with the seasons and festivals, and is visible from the park viewpoints, from the Kitanada coast and from the hotels out on the point. Naruto has no nightlife: by nine almost everything is shut and the bars are in Tokushima, forty minutes away by train, with the last service well before midnight. If you sleep up at the park this is the after-dinner activity; if you sleep in town you need a car.

• Uchinoumi Park and the inner bay 2.5 h

  On the sheltered side of the island, out of the currents, Uchinoumi bay is a sheet of almost permanently still water where wakame and oysters are farmed - the exact opposite of the strait a couple of kilometres away. The park along its edge is free and has one of the largest lawns in the prefecture, big shipwreck-themed play equipment, sports courts and barbecue areas, and it is the best place in the destination to let children loose after a morning in a museum. About ten minutes by car from the station; awkward by bus.

What only happens on specific dates

• Naruto's Beethoven's Ninth concert the first Sunday of June

Ready-made routes through Naruto

Chains well with

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