Castles & Sites

There are twelve original castle keeps left in Japan. Every other Japanese castle you have ever seen in a photograph […]

Tōdō Takatora built twenty-plus castles across a forty-year career, and only two of them are pentagons. The other eighteen are

Twelve original tenshu keeps survive in Japan, and every single one of them has lost something. Himeji kept its keep

On New Year’s Day 1784, the first day of the fourth year of Tenmei, a lightning bolt hit the tenshu

The first time you spot Marugame Castle from the Sanuki plain, you are probably not looking at the keep. You

In 1875, a local Matsue man named Takagi Gonpachi walked into a Meiji government property auction and paid 180 yen

At thirteen minutes past four on the afternoon of 28 June 1948, a Monday, the Fukui plain buckled. The epicentre

The man who actually built Hikone Castle was dead before the first stone was laid. Ii Naomasa — the Red

On 24 October 2015, the three-storey tenshu of Hirosaki Castle finished a 70-metre journey it had taken eight weeks to

Between late September and early April, in the hour before dawn, if the cold air has pooled thickly enough in