CODE IN TOKYO

There Are "Two Kinds" of Japanese Castles

Today’s topic has nothing to do with IT.

During my long vacation, I went on a castle tour.

What struck me again is that Japanese castles broadly fall into two patterns.

One is castles like Himeji Castle — “castles that remain as they were in the old days.”

The other is castles like Osaka Castle — “castles rebuilt after World War II.”

From the outside, honestly, you can’t really tell at first glance. But they’re actually quite different.

Himeji Castle is an extremely valuable castle that preserves its pre-Edo-period (before 1603) appearance to this day, and it’s designated as a National Treasure. It’s probably one of the most famous “authentic castles” in Japan.

Osaka Castle, on the other hand, is built of reinforced concrete in its current form.

There’s even an elevator inside.

To put it bluntly, it’s closer to “a modern museum shaped like a castle.”

Of course, this isn’t to say Osaka Castle has no value. Rather, after WWII, many regions rebuilt their castles out of a desire to revive the symbol of the town.

But the assumption that “Japanese castles = all still standing from the old days” is a bit off.

In fact, many of Japan’s castles were lost at some point.

When the Edo period ended (1868) and the samurai era came to a close, many castles lost their purpose. Maintenance was expensive, so they were torn down or left to decay.

Furthermore, many of the precious castles that did survive were burned down in air raids during WWII.

As a result, among the castles you can see today, there’s a mix of:

Recently, at Nagoya Castle, there’s even talk of “tearing down the concrete keep and rebuilding it in wood according to the original blueprints.”

But then a barrier-free accessibility problem comes up.

If you faithfully reproduce the old structure, it’s hard to install things like elevators.

In other words, it becomes a difficult question of:

This time I visited many castles, and both kinds had plenty of foreign tourists.

But from a foreign visitor’s perspective, both Himeji Castle and Osaka Castle might look like “the same Japanese castle.”

In reality, though, there’s a difference between:

A side note

By the way, Tokyo itself doesn’t have a castle, so don’t go looking for one. The land where the castle once stood is now the Imperial Palace, so you can still see the moats and stone walls. In the early Edo period (early 1600s) there was a keep, but it burned in a fire and was never rebuilt afterward.

It’s said as a noble story that the money was spent on rebuilding the fire-stricken city rather than rebuilding the castle (this was after the Great Fire of Meireki in 1657). But the truth is more likely that the shogunate’s power had grown so great that a castle was no longer necessary.