First-Time Kochi City: The Original Castle, Hirome Market & Katsurahama — 2 Days

Kochi Castle stands on a low hill at the centre of the city, and it holds a distinction no other castle in Japan can claim: it keeps both its original Edo-period wooden keep and its original honmaru palace, the lord's residence, still standing together. Built by Yamauchi Kazutoyo from 1601 after he was granted Tosa, the keep was rebuilt after a fire in 1749 and has survived every century since, one of only twelve original keeps in the country. You climb through the stone gates and the Kaitokukan palace, where the tatami audience rooms open onto the tower, and up the steep internal stairs of the keep to a top floor that looks over the whole city to the mountains and the sea. It is the natural first stop and the symbol of Tosa.

Keep and palace about ¥420 (approx., 2026); roughly 9:00-17:00 (last entry 16:30), closed Dec 26-Jan 1. In the city centre, a short tram ride from Harimaya-bashi. Allow about 90 minutes.

The Sunday market on Otesuji, the broad avenue running east from the castle gate, has been held every Sunday for some three hundred years, and it is one of the great street markets of Japan. For about a kilometre, several hundred stalls sell the produce of Tosa: mountain vegetables and citrus, dried fish and yuzu, knives and tools and potted plants, pickles and country sweets, and the local snack of imoten, sweet-potato fritters eaten warm in the hand. Farmers and growers run their own stalls, so the talk is direct and the prices are honest. If your trip falls on a Sunday it is an unmissable morning; if not, the smaller daily market culture survives in Hirome and the shopping arcades.

Free; Sundays only, roughly 5:00-15:00 (shorter in winter), closed Jan 1-2 and Yosakoi week (about Aug 9-12). Along Otesuji-dori by the castle. Allow about 45 minutes.

Hirome Market is a covered hall of some sixty small stalls and shared tables a few steps from the castle, loud, crowded and the best place in the city to eat. The dish to order is katsuo no tataki, the bonito seared hard over a roaring straw fire so the skin is charred and smoky while the centre stays raw, then sliced thick and eaten with salt or ponzu, raw garlic and myoga. The Myojinmaru stall grills it in front of you over flaming rice straw, and you carry the plate to a shared table with a glass of local sake or a Tosa beer. It is the noisy, generous heart of how Kochi eats, and the single best introduction to Tosa food.

A meal about ¥1,200-2,500 (approx., 2026); hall roughly 10:00-22:00 (Sun from 9:00), occasional maintenance days. Beside the castle. Allow about 75 minutes.

Chikurinji rides the wooded summit of Mt Godaisan, east across the river from the city, and it is the thirty-first temple of the Shikoku eighty-eight-temple pilgrimage and the only one dedicated to Monju, the bodhisattva of wisdom. Founded in the eighth century, it keeps a graceful five-storey pagoda among the cedars and a main hall that is a Nationally Important Cultural Property, and behind them a celebrated Muromachi-period garden of ponds and rocks attributed to the priest-designer Muso Soseki. White-clad pilgrims still climb the stone steps, and the whole hilltop is quiet and green. It pairs naturally with the botanical garden next door for a calm afternoon above the city.

Garden and treasure house about ¥500 (approx., 2026); grounds free, roughly 8:00-17:00. On Mt Godaisan, about 20 minutes by car or bus from the centre. Allow about 50 minutes.

The Makino Botanical Garden spreads over the slopes of Mt Godaisan beside Chikurinji, founded in 1958 to honour Makino Tomitaro, the Kochi-born father of Japanese botany who named some 1,500 plants and whose life inspired the 2023 national morning drama. Some 3,000 species grow across the hillside in glasshouses and open beds, with a famous greenhouse of tropical and southern plants and curving timber pavilions that frame the view to the city and the sea. Paths wind between the seasonal beds — camellias and cherries, irises and the autumn grasses — and the museum tells Makino's story. It is one of the loveliest botanical gardens in the country, and an easy, beautiful close to the afternoon on the hill.

Admission about ¥850 (approx., 2026); roughly 9:00-17:00 (last entry 16:30), occasional maintenance days. Next to Chikurinji on Mt Godaisan. Allow about 70 minutes.

Katsurahama is the wide crescent of pale sand and pine-clad headland on the Pacific south of the city, the most famous view in Kochi and a place woven into the old moon-viewing songs of Tosa. At its northern point stands the great bronze of Sakamoto Ryoma, over five metres tall on a high plinth, gazing out across the ocean toward the wider world he wanted Japan to join. Behind the beach a small shrine sits on the rocks, the Tosa fighting-dog and aquarium draw families, and the surf rolls in hard against the strand. The beach is for walking and looking rather than swimming — the currents are dangerous — but the sweep of sand, pine and open sea is the image of Tosa.

Free; always accessible (shrine and aquarium have their own hours). About 30 minutes by bus or car from the centre. Allow about 60 minutes.

On the cliff above Katsurahama stands the Sakamoto Ryoma Memorial Museum, a striking modern building given over to the most beloved figure in Tosa and one of the architects of modern Japan. Born in Kochi in 1836, Ryoma left his domain to broker the alliance that toppled the shogunate and drafted an eight-point plan for a new national government before he was assassinated in Kyoto in 1867, aged thirty-one. The museum keeps his letters — vivid, funny, startlingly modern in voice — alongside the blood-stained screen from the scene of his death and exhibits that trace the dizzying few years in which he changed the country. The rooftop terrace looks straight out over the Pacific he dreamed of crossing. It gives the bronze on the beach below its full meaning.

Admission about ¥500 (approx., 2026; more for special exhibitions); roughly 9:00-17:00, open year-round. On the cliff above Katsurahama. Allow about 60 minutes.

Back in the city near Harimaya-bashi, Tsukasa is a long-running Tosa restaurant and the comfortable, sit-down counterpart to the roar of Hirome Market for a last proper meal. The kitchen does the classics of the province in their full form: katsuo no tataki seared over straw, the great platter sawachi-ryori that piles sashimi, sushi and local dishes on one dish for sharing, the small reef-fish and shellfish of the Tosa coast, and the local sake the region is proud of. After a morning at the beach and the museum, it is the easy, generous way to taste Tosa cooking properly before you move on — slower and quieter than the market, with the same southern abundance.

A meal about ¥1,800-4,000 (approx., 2026); lunch roughly 11:00-14:00. Near Harimaya-bashi in the city centre. Allow about 75 minutes.