What is Shikoku, Part 3: The Kochi Conundrum

Crazy ideas for Shikoku`s most remote prefecture.

I've done an assload of hiking the last month and a half, and can accurately report that the pilgrimage experience can be summed up in the following percentages:
20% of the trail goes through small/medium size towns that are just kind of getting by. Convenience stores, random mom and pop restaurants, a cultural attraction or two to get tourists to show up, etc.
20% of the trail is mountain paths featuring the most spectacular scenery of the pilgrimage. You have to work hard both up and downhill to earn those views, but the fresh air and cool temperatures up there make it worth it.
20% goes through straight up rural farmland. We're talking rice fields, greenhouses, and rows of random crops like green onions and taro plants. Beautiful in its own way, if not terribly exciting.
20% is hiking along the shoulder of some county or state road. While the scenery tends to be nice, you have cars and trucks whizzing by at 80km per hour 10 feet away from your face every minute or so. Not great for inner peace and reflection.
10% is through busting big towns like Matsuyama and Tokushima. Lots of restaurants, cafes, and all the comforts of civilization.
And finally, 10% goes through dying small towns full of empty elementary schools, shuttered businesses, abandoned homes, and empty temples whose primary occupants are vines and weeds.
This is the breakdown for the trail for Tokushima, Ehime, and Kagawa prefectures. However, for Kochi prefecture, go ahead and increase the dying small town proportion to like 40%, and reduce everything else proportionally. Its a pretty depressing place.

To be honest, my several day break in Kyushu was necessary not just to take care of my physical wounds, but my mental anguish at having to experience town after town experiencing the worst consequences of Japan's mass migration to the major cities. The other three prefectures benefit from either train or road connections to the Japanese mainland. Kochi prefecture, if you look at a map, is both landlocked and sealocked (is that a thing?) out of these lifelines to the mainland, and like a tumor cut off from a blood supply, it is withering away. There aren't jobs or opportunities in these towns, which makes people move away, which makes these towns depressing, which makes no one want to visit or live there. Its a brutal cycle. So me and my Australian travel buddy Barnaby brainstormed some random, totally unresearched solutions!

1. Bring the Shinkansen to Kochi city. The Shinkansen, or bullet train, is the aorta of the Japanese rail system, and cities connected to it get a predictable boost in tourism and prestige. Not just Kochi, but the whole of Shikoku is bypassed by the Shinkansen, making it sort of analogous to the "flyover states" phenomenon in the USA. (For the record I Love the South, and am planning to visit my buddies over there this summer.) Bringing the Shinkansen to Shikoku is the rare solution that everyone can agree on; people want it to boost their towns, and politicians want it so they can be the guy that saved the town. The only problem is money. Building new Shinkansen tracks is expensive, like Hundreds of Billions of Dollars expensive. No one has any clue how to scare up this amount of money in working class Shikoku. The bullet train will probably eventually come to the island eventually for a variety of political and economic reasons, but not anytime soon.

2. Put a US Military Base there! This one was my idea. The vast majority of US troops in Japan are stationed on the tiny islands of Okinawa, and for decades the Okinawan people have begged, screamed, and protested to get some of their land back from the bases. While the Japanese government likes to play lip service to moving the troops, in reality they love having them in Okinawa: they get to have the security of US bases protecting Japan, but on an island far away from the mainland where they don't have to worry about off duty soldiers causing trouble and fighter jets waking people up. However, this arrangement has always been, and continues to be monumentally unfair for the people of Okinawa, whose culture continues to be warped by a massive US military presence. So put a bunch of them in Kochi prefecture! You still have troops in Japan to protect against North Korean and Chinese aggression, and they're in a prefecture that's empty anyway, so there's no one to bother! It would bring money and jobs to a place that's starving for both.

3. Let Nature come back. They already did this at the Shimanto river, which is the last undammed river in Japan. Tourists and fishermen flock there to experience the novelty of a river that waxes and wanes with the rains and tides, and to taste delicious fish unfettered by random roadblocks. So let nature come back on a much more massive scale. Harvest all the government managed cedar forests in Kochi, and let native plants return. Demolish more dams and free up more rivers to their natural state. And small towns that have been dead for a decade or more? BURN THEM DOWN. Ok maybe not that extreme, but in these towns with 8 people left, just wait for them to leave or pass away, and then BURN THEM DOWN, and let nature take over. Shikoku, besides being the site of the 88 Temple Pilgrimage, kind of lacks an identity. Honshu is the main island that has Everything, Hokkaido is the Japanese final frontier, Kyushu is Euro/Asia/Mixed up Japan, and Okinawa is Da Islands, man. Shikoku should have the identity of The Old Japan, or Natural Japan. Unfortunately, Tokushima, Ehime, and Kagawa prefectures are too full of people to attempt some massive rebranding project. However, Kochi presents enough of a blank canvas that a huge change could be possible. Even most Japanese people can't imagine what the Old Japan was like, but if Kochi can claim that identity, it has a chance at survival. Or they can keep pushing their weird tourism campaign that turns assassinated 18th century politicians into cute yet gruesome cartoon mascots. Which isn't a bad idea per se, but it doesn't seem to be working too well.