A person from Kochi is Tosa before they are Shikoku. A person from Kagawa is Sanuki. The island-wide identity exists, but it has always sat on top of older, deeper loyalties - to province, to dialect, to coastline and mountain range.
A Complete History of Shikoku is the first comprehensive English-language account of Japan's smallest main island, spanning from prehistoric settlement through medieval warfare, the domain economies of the Tokugawa period, the eighty-eight-temple pilgrimage, the upheavals of modernisation and war, and the bridge-building era that linked Shikoku to the mainland.
It follows the island into a twenty-first century defined by depopulation, climate risk, cultural revival, and experiments in managed decline - and asks what the smallest of Japan's main islands can teach the rest of the country about living with change.
