Located to the south of Honshu and to the east of Kyushu, Shikoku is the smallest of the four main Japanese islands, covering an area of around seven thousand square miles. The population of approximately four and a half million resides in four prefectures, with most people living in the less mountainous north side of the island.

Since the late 1990s, Shikoku has been connected to Honshu by three expressways - using a total of nineteen bridges to span the Inland Sea of Japan - and these modern links to the main island have a gone a long way to dispel the isolation that was once felt by the people of “the four provinces”.