Hikone Castle: Built from Three Other Castles

The man who actually built Hikone Castle was dead before the first stone was laid. Ii Naomasa — the Red Devil of Sekigahara, commander of the Tokugawa right wing on 21 October 1600 — took a musket ball in the right arm during the pursuit of Shimazu Yoshihiro’s retreat that afternoon. He survived the wound long enough to receive Ieyasu’s reward of 180,000 koku at Sawayama, and died eighteen months later in 1602 before he could move the clan off the old Ishida Mitsunari fortification onto a better site.

His son Ii Naotaka was seven years old. His other son Ii Naokatsu took over the domain as a minor, and the clan elder Kimata Morikatsu went to Ieyasu asking what to do about a castle the new lord didn’t want to live in. Ieyasu’s answer was to scrap Sawayama, four kilometres west, pull down Ōtsu Castle and Azuchi Castle, and use the stones and timbers and roof tiles from all three to build one new castle on Konki-yama hill overlooking Lake Biwa. Construction started in 1604 and finished in 1622.

I keep coming back to Hikone because of that recycling clause. Japan’s surviving castles are usually treated as monolithic objects — Matsumoto was built by Ishikawa Yasunaga in 1593-1596, Himeji by Ikeda Terumasa in 1601-1609, end of story. Hikone is different.

The three-story daitenshu you photograph from the Genkyū-en garden was lifted off Ōtsu Castle in Shiga, shortened from four storeys to three so that it wouldn’t out-rank Edo Castle’s five, and reassembled on a Sawayama-sourced stone base. The Tenbin-yagura balance turret above the moat bridge is said to come from Nagahama Castle. The Saiwai-maru three-story turret on the west side is reportedly the former tenshu of Odani Castle.

This is a castle made of dismantled castles. It is also one of twelve Japanese castles with an original tenshu still standing, one of five whose keep is designated a National Treasure, and the seat of one of the hardest-working daimyō houses of the Edo period.

What Hikone Castle actually is

Hikone Castle (彦根城, Hikone-jō) is a hirayama-jō — a flat-hilltop castle — built on Konki-yama, a low 50-metre ridge on the east shore of Lake Biwa in what is now central Hikone City, Shiga Prefecture. The hill takes its alternative name — Konki-yama, “golden tortoise hill” — from a legend about a gold-backed turtle, and the castle is sometimes called Konki-jō for the same reason. It sits in the narrow five-kilometre plain between Biwa and the Suzuka foothills, exactly on the junction of the Nakasendō and the Hokkoku-kaidō, which is to say exactly on the road that connects the old capital in Kyoto with the new one in Edo. The Ii clan were put here because this was the single most strategic inland junction in central Japan.

The surviving complex is organised around four concentric enclosures. The honmaru inner bailey sits on top of the hill with the daitenshu on its north edge. The Nishi-no-maru west bailey, connected to the honmaru by the Rōka-bashi corridor bridge, holds the three-story Nishi-no-maru Sanjū-yagura turret.

The Ni-no-maru second bailey wraps around the south and east, with the palace residence (now reconstructed as the Hikone Castle Museum), and the San-no-maru third bailey runs the outer ring. To the north of this, outside the strict castle enclosure but inside the full compound, sit the Genkyū-en and Rakuraku-en gardens. The two together with their associated palace quarters form a National Place of Scenic Beauty, and you should plan a full hour for them separately from the castle itself.

Two things about the building list matter for the claim to National Treasure status. First, the tenshu is one of only twelve surviving original-construction keeps in Japan — twelve buildings that have stood continuously from before 1868 and never been rebuilt from scratch. Sister members of that twelve include Matsumoto, Himeji, Inuyama, Matsue, Maruoka, Bitchū-Matsuyama, Hirosaki, Marugame, Iyo-Matsuyama, Uwajima, and Kōchi.

Second, within that twelve, only five have their tenshu designated as National Treasure: Himeji, Matsumoto, Inuyama, Matsue, and Hikone. The other seven are merely Important Cultural Property. This is the top shelf.

Hikone also retains a lot more than the keep. Five outbuildings hold Important Cultural Property status — the Tenbin-yagura balance turret, the Taiko-mon gate-turret and continuation, the Nishi-no-maru Sanjū-yagura three-story turret and continuation, the Sawa-guchi Tamon-yagura bargain-basement turret by the east gate, and the Umaya horse-stable. The horse-stable is the only surviving castle horse-stable in Japan. You come to Hikone expecting one keep and get a set of five original turrets, an original stable, two original gardens, and the Sawa-guchi moat-and-bridge complex that is photographically among the best preserved castle approaches anywhere.

Ii Naomasa, Sekigahara, and Sawayama — 1600 to 1602

The story starts with Ii Naomasa‘s wound at the Battle of Sekigahara. Naomasa was one of the Tokugawa Four Heavenly Kings — the Shitennō, alongside Honda Tadakatsu, Sakakibara Yasumasa, and Sakai Tadatsugu — and he had ridden the Akazonae Red Force cavalry down the left flank of Ieyasu’s Eastern army that morning in the fog. The Red Force was a piece of visual theatre — every man, horse, banner, and lacquered sashimono dyed the same shade of carmine — that Naomasa had inherited from the destroyed Takeda clan in 1582, an inheritance he had run as his signature unit ever since.

After Ishida Mitsunari‘s centre collapsed in the early afternoon, the Shimazu contingent on Mitsunari’s right flank made a famous retreat — the Shimazu no Shiryō-banare, the “Shimazu breakthrough” — cutting diagonally across the Eastern army rather than fleeing straight back. Naomasa led the pursuit and took a musket ball in his right arm during the chase. The ball went deep enough that the wound did not heal.

The letters he wrote to his household over the next eighteen months grow visibly shakier; the signature on his last surviving document (from 1602) is dictated. He died at Sawayama on 1 March 1602, aged forty-two.

The wound mattered politically because Naomasa was the single highest-ranking Tokugawa retainer — 180,000 koku at Sawayama, promoted to Jushiige rank in 1601, serving as Ieyasu’s chief negotiator with the western daimyō after Sekigahara — and the castle he had inherited was Mitsunari’s old base. Sawayama Castle (佐和山城, Sawayama-jō) had been a celebrated fortress. The Edo saying was “Mitsunari ni sugitaru mono ga futatsu ari, Shima no Sakon to Sawayama no shiro” — “There are two things Mitsunari didn’t deserve: Shima Sakon, and Sawayama Castle.”

It sat on the higher Sawa-yama ridge three kilometres east of the modern Hikone Castle, and Naomasa hated it. He hated the medieval hilltop layout, he hated the fact that it was associated with his executed rival, and he wanted to move the Ii headquarters down onto a lower hill at Iso-yama, on the Biwa waterfront. He never got there.

When Naomasa died the domain went to his elder son Ii Naokatsu, a child of twelve. The dead Red Devil’s chief retainer Kimata Morikatsu assumed practical administration and went to Tokugawa Ieyasu at Fushimi with a single request: let us build Naomasa’s intended castle, not at Iso-yama (where the waterline was impractical) but on Konki-yama hill, two kilometres west of Sawayama. Ieyasu agreed.

The household broke ground on 5 May 1603. Construction was ordered as a tenka-bushin — a national public-works project — with twelve daimyō houses from seven provinces contributing labour and funds, and even the Owari Tokugawa branch sent men. The project was, in scale and political status, a demonstration of what the Ii clan was worth to the new Tokugawa order.

1604-1622 — the castle built from three other castles

The recycling clause is where Hikone Castle departs from every sister in the surviving twelve. Mid-construction the Tokugawa bakufu ordered the Ōtsu Castle on the south shore of Biwa to be scrapped — Ōtsu was the 1600 Kyōgoku Takatsugu stronghold that the Western army had besieged during the Sekigahara week, and the new peace had no use for it — and its four-story tenshu was cut down, dismantled, barged across the lake, and re-erected on top of Konki-yama as the three-story Hikone keep. The downgrade from four storeys to three was deliberate: Edo Castle was five, no daimyō house wanted to be seen outranking the shogunal seat, and the Ōtsu keep at its full height would have been too close.

The stone base was quarried in part from Sawayama — the old Mitsunari walls were pulled down, and the large faced stones were moved four kilometres east to the new hill. Some of those Sawayama stones are visible today in the so-called ushibokatsumi “burdock-pile” section of the Tenbin-yagura base, and a handful of the enormous foundation blocks in the castle’s Kyushichi-ishi “large-stone” walls are provably Sawayama-origin by their grain and tool-marking patterns. The roof tiles came from Azuchi Castle, the Oda Nobunaga fortress on the opposite Biwa shore that had been torched at Honnō-ji in 1582 and partially quarried for materials over the next twenty years; several of the original tile-makers’ marks at Hikone match kilns that were firing Azuchi tiles in the 1570s.

Construction ran in three phases. Phase one, 1604 to 1606, got the honmaru enclosure, the Ni-no-maru, and the daitenshu up — the keep was finished the same year Ii Naokatsu moved in, 1606. Phase two, the Ōsaka-no-Jin window from 1614 to 1615 through to about 1616, added the outer fortifications during a time when the bakufu was still actively preparing for the Toyotomi holdouts. Phase three, 1616 to 1622, finished the Ni-no-maru Goten palace buildings, the formal residential quarters, and the Nishi-no-maru Sanjū-yagura three-story turret — this last famously said to be the former tenshu of Odani Castle (Azai Nagamasa’s mountain-top fortress) brought down intact and re-erected on the Nishi-no-maru platform.

The Tenbin-yagura — the “balance turret” that gates the Rōka-bashi corridor bridge — is said in the Ii family Ii nenpu chronicle to have been moved from Nagahama Castle. It has a main gate in the centre and two-story roofed turrets on the left and right flanks, configured so that the whole thing looks like the scale-arm of a weighing balance. No other surviving Japanese castle has this arrangement.

The left half of the base is in otoshi-zumi dropped-stone masonry from an 1854 Ansei-era repair; the right half is in the older ushibokatsumi burdock-pile style from the 1604 original. You can date the two halves by eye from the bridge.

Naotaka, the seven-year-old son who grew up to become the real master of the castle, took over the lordship from his brother Naokatsu in 1615 after the bakufu judged Naokatsu poorly performing during the Ōsaka-no-Jin campaigns. He ran Hikone for the next forty-seven years until his death in 1659.

He also commissioned the Genkyū-en garden in 1677 through his son (by which point he was dead but the project was paid for from his designated fund), he patronised tea-ceremony scholarship in a way that made the Ii household one of the two or three major tea-collecting houses of the early Edo period, and he pushed the Ii koku-rating upward through a series of territorial acquisitions to reach 350,000 koku by 1633. This was the highest fudai daimyō rating under the Tokugawa. No other hereditary Tokugawa vassal ever held more land.

The Ii clan and 260 years of Hikone

The Ii ran Hikone for fourteen generations across the full span of the Edo period — from Ii Naokatsu in 1602 through to Ii Naonori in 1871 — which makes them one of a very short list of Japanese daimyō houses that held a single major domain continuously from the foundation of the Tokugawa system to its abolition. The domain went through thirty-five headship transitions in total when you include lord-regents and temporary successions, but the main-line inheritance went intact. The Ii were a fudai clan of the first rank, one of four houses eligible for the supreme office of tairō — Great Elder — and they provided the bakufu with that office more often than any other clan in the Edo period.

The sankin-kōtai rotation — the alternate-attendance policy that required every daimyō to spend every second year in Edo — hit the Ii about as hard as it hit any house. Hikone to Edo on the Nakasendō is 444 kilometres and took the daimyō procession about sixteen days. The Ii kept a permanent Edo residence at Sotosakurada — today the site of the National Diet — and the ceremonial procession between the two capitals was staged roughly every year, alternating with a stay at the home castle.

The Ii procession was the largest in the sankin system: 2,500 to 3,000 retainers, three daimyō palanquins, 400 baggage horses. The historical records give the annual travel budget as 7,000 ryō, which in 1700 was about 15 per cent of the domain’s total annual expenditure.

Of the fourteen Ii heads of Hikone, three names are worth pulling out of the sequence. Ii Naotaka (2nd, 1615-1659) who actually finished building the castle and brought the domain to its 350,000-koku peak. Ii Naooki (5th, 1701-1713) who served as tairō under shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi through the Akō Incident — the famous Forty-Seven Rōnin affair — and issued the 1703 rulings on samurai revenge that still generate law-student essays. And Ii Naosuke (13th, 1850-1860), whose career began at Hikone and ended at the Sakurada-mon in Edo.

1860 — Ii Naosuke and the Sakurada-mon

Ii Naosuke came to the lordship of Hikone at the age of thirty-five in November 1850, by a route that would be implausible in fiction. He was his father Naonaka’s fourteenth son by a concubine, which meant essentially no chance of inheriting anything. So Naosuke was sent in his teens to a small Buddhist temple outside Hikone — the Umoregi-no-ya, “Driftwood Hermitage” — with a token stipend and the prospect of a quiet life as a minor tea-ceremony poet.

The Umoregi-no-ya still stands in central Hikone and you can visit it; it is three tatami rooms, a writing desk, and a pine tree in the garden. Then over the course of the 1830s and 1840s every one of Naosuke’s thirteen elder brothers either died young of illness or got adopted out into minor branch houses. In November 1850 he was pulled out of the hermitage, given the Ii name, and installed as daimyō.

He made a capable lord and a formidable national figure. In April 1858 Shōgun Tokugawa Iesada named him Tairō — Great Elder — the highest non-shogunal office in the bakufu and one Naosuke’s Ii clan had held more often than any other. Naosuke immediately faced the two biggest crises of the late Edo period: the American demand for commercial treaties (Townsend Harris and the Harris Treaty, 29 July 1858) and the succession struggle for the dying Iesada.

On the treaty, he signed without imperial approval and took the blame for it. On the succession, he installed the twelve-year-old Tokugawa Yoshitomi — later Iemochi — as the fourteenth shōgun, defeating the reformist Hitotsubashi Keiki faction and their allies in Mito, Tosa, and Satsuma.

The purge followed. Between the autumn of 1858 and spring 1859 Naosuke pushed through what became known as the Ansei no Taigoku — the Ansei Purge — which dismissed or disciplined over a hundred imperialist and reformist officials, forced retirement on Tokugawa Nariaki of Mito and Matsudaira Yoshinaga of Fukui, and executed the scholar Yoshida Shōin. From Mito’s perspective this was a declaration of war on the imperialist movement, and Mito was also Nariaki’s domain. Seventeen Mito samurai and one Satsuma ally agreed to kill Naosuke in response.

The assassination took place on the morning of 24 March 1860 (Ansei 7, 3rd month, 3rd day), at the Sakurada-mon — the southwest gate of Edo Castle — during a heavy, unseasonable snowstorm. Naosuke was on his way from his Sotosakurada residence to a shogunal audience, travelling in the standard tairō palanquin with a Hikone escort of about sixty retainers. The eighteen conspirators ambushed the procession at the gate.

Two of them opened fire with short-barrel pistols through the palanquin walls at close range; the others rushed in with swords. Naosuke was hit by at least one bullet in the thigh and killed. The conspirators’ leader Arimura Jizaemon of Satsuma decapitated him and carried the head away. Forty-six of Naosuke’s escort were killed or wounded; the seventeen Mito conspirators and their Satsuma ally suffered equivalent losses.

The Sakurada-mon Incident — Sakuradamon-gai no Hen — is the event that most historians point to as the start of the Bakumatsu crisis proper. Before it, the bakufu was under reformist pressure but politically functional. After it, central authority collapsed over the next eight years toward the Boshin War and the Meiji Restoration.

If you stand at the Sakurada-mon today (it still stands, next to the National Diet building, which is where the old Ii residence used to be) you are looking at the spot where Japan’s foreign-policy impasse became a Japan-wide political crisis in ninety seconds of snow and gunfire. For the full arc of how Naosuke got from Hikone to Edo, see my separate piece on Ii Naomasa — Naomasa is the ancestor whose 1600 Sekigahara victory made the Ii a fudai-first clan, and it is Naomasa’s political inheritance that Naosuke was defending when he died.

Meiji — the saved castle

The 1871 haihan-chiken abolition of the han-domain system handed Hikone Castle to the Meiji state. The 1873 haijō-rei castle-abolition law ordered the demolition of most Edo-period fortifications, and around 140 of Japan’s surviving keeps were broken down for materials or burned over the next five years. Hikone was initially assigned to the Army Ministry as a military installation, which spared it in the first wave, but by 1878 the Ministry had decided it was structurally decayed and not worth maintaining. The tenshu was scheduled for sale and demolition.

The intervention came from an unlikely source. Emperor Meiji made a formal tour through Shiga Prefecture in October 1878 — the Meiji Tenno no Go-junko imperial inspection — and the tour passed through Hikone. Travelling in the imperial entourage was the sangi statesman Ōkuma Shigenobu, who was a historically-minded Satsuma reformer with connections to the surviving old daimyō households.

Ōkuma saw the castle, grasped that it was slated for scrap, and made the case to the emperor directly. The emperor agreed. The imperial directive came down that Hikone Castle was to be preserved, the structure was transferred to Imperial Household Agency control as a goryōsho imperial holding, and in due course was gifted back to the last Hikone daimyō — the still-living Ii Naonori, Naosuke’s son — as a private property in his family’s name. That saved it.

The twentieth century gave Hikone the standard National-Treasure trajectory — 1944 donation by the Ii family to Hikone City, 1951 castle-ruins designation as a national Historic Site with six structures upgraded to Important Cultural Property, 1952 promotion of the tenshu and its附櫓 attached turret to National Treasure rank (the five-castle National Treasure club: Himeji, Matsumoto, Inuyama, Matsue, and Hikone), 1956 elevation of the whole site to Special Historic Site, and the Shōwa Dai-shūri great repair of 1957-1960 (the keep) and 1960-1962 (the Nishi-no-maru turret and Sawa-guchi Tamon-yagura). The work was meticulous. Edo-period tool marks were preserved where practicable, and the foundation sinking problem that had threatened the daitenshu since the 1920s was corrected with a steel under-reinforcement that is invisible from outside the keep.

1945 ran closer than it should have. The US Army Air Forces had Hikone scheduled for night-bombing on the evening of 15 August 1945. The raid never took off — the imperial surrender broadcast went out at noon the same day, the war ended, and the B-29s stayed on the ground.

If Japan had surrendered a day later, or if Hirohito had not broken the cabinet deadlock on 14 August, the wooden keep you climb today would have gone the way of Okayama and Nagoya and Wakayama — incinerated in the July-August incendiary campaign. The Himeji near-miss on 4 July 1945 gets the attention; Hikone’s near-miss on 15 August deserves the same.

Hikonyan and the 400-year anniversary

I will say, carefully, that I am not sentimental about yuru-chara. Japan’s mascot-tourism industry produced about 1,700 local yuru-chara between 2007 and 2015 — every prefecture, many cities, some individual shrines. Most of them are forgettable. Hikonyan is not forgettable.

The character is a white cat in a red lacquered samurai helmet, designed by the Osaka illustrator Mochi Ueda for the 2007 400th-anniversary celebration of Hikone Castle’s founding. The name is a pun — Hikone plus nyan, the Japanese onomatopoeia for a cat’s meow — and the red helmet is a direct reference to Ii Naomasa’s Red Force armour, which the Hikone Castle Museum displays in its 17th-century original form.

The 400-year festival itself ran from 21 March 2007 to 11 November 2007 and drew 2.3 million visitors to the castle — about four times the normal annual footfall. Hikone City had been planning it since about 2002. The mascot was commissioned as a local colour piece, expected to work for that single year, and was scheduled for retirement at the end of the festival. What actually happened was that Hikonyan became the single most popular yuru-chara in Japan almost immediately, won the first national Yuru-chara Grand Prix in 2010 (the precursor to today’s industry-wide competition), and was kept on the city payroll indefinitely.

Daily castle visitor numbers have settled at about 750,000 a year in the post-Hikonyan era, roughly 30 per cent above the pre-2007 baseline. The yuru-chara boom has been over since about 2018 but Hikonyan specifically has outlasted it, because the character happens to be tied to a permanent tourism draw — the castle itself — rather than a one-off festival.

If you are bringing children to Hikone, time your visit around one of the three daily performances. If you are not, time your visit to avoid the performance crowd at the Sawa-guchi gate. Both of these are legitimate planning decisions.

Architecture — what to look for when you climb

The keep is not tall. At 21 metres from the stone base to the top ridge it is about two-thirds the height of the Matsumoto daitenshu and less than half the height of Himeji. The smallness is because of the Ōtsu-origin recycling — the Ōtsu keep had been four storeys, cut down to three for Hikone to stay under Edo Castle’s rank — and also because Konki-yama is a low 50-metre hill, so visible elevation didn’t require bulk at the top. What the keep lacks in height it makes up for in decorative density: every major Japanese roof-gable form is present, often stacked on the same façade.

The windows are worth attention. The ground floor has tsuki-age-mado push-up windows that lift rather than slide — a defensive feature designed to be blocked from inside during a siege. The upper two floors have katō-mado, the bell-curved window shape borrowed from Chinese Zen temple architecture. Other Japanese castles use katō-mado sparingly; Hikone uses them on every upper storey as the default window type, which is the influence of Ōtsu Castle’s original pre-migration designer.

The arrow and musket loopholes — called sama — are built into the walls as hidden long slots, invisible from outside but opening out when the plaster plugs are knocked out from inside. You will see the plug-marks if you look at the walls from inside the keep.

The stairs between floors are the steepest in the surviving twelve originals — 62 degrees at the steepest, which is only just off vertical. This was intentional. The whole Japanese castle genre uses severe stairs as a defensive measure — a defender at the top can kick an attacker backwards down them — and Hikone, as a castle built during 1604-1622 when the threat of real siege was still plausible before the 1615 Osaka campaign settled the country, retains the severe profiles that later Edo-period keeps softened. When you climb you are using one original hemp-rope rail for balance, and the rail is for a reason.

The Kyushichi-ishi large-stone wall section in the honmaru base is worth a careful look. This is where the Sawayama-recycled stones actually appear, visible in the lower half of the main keep platform on the southern face. The stones are large — the biggest is 2.4 metres on its long axis — and they are laid in ushibokatsumi burdock-pile masonry, which is to say rough-faced and irregularly fitted with minor stones filling the gaps.

Compare this to the otoshi-zumi dropped-stone work on the left half of the Tenbin-yagura base, which is regular, tight-jointed, and dates to an 1854 Ansei-era repair. You can see four centuries of walling technique on one tour.

There is one less-celebrated thing worth noticing. The keep has no central pillar of the kind Matsumoto and Himeji famously rely on — no shin-bashira running from basement to top floor. Instead the Hikone tenshu is built in the kasane-yagura stacked-turret system, which means each floor’s pillar grid is independent and sits on the floor below, rather than running through.

This is an earlier architectural logic, closer to what the Ōtsu Castle of 1600 was doing, and it is the main structural reason the keep survived the 1957-1960 repair with less intervention than the Matsumoto or Himeji equivalents needed. Each floor is, in effect, a separate building stacked on top of the one below. When one floor sank, you could lift it.

Genkyū-en — the Edo pond-stroll garden

The Genkyū-en (玄宮園, Genkyū-en) sits immediately north of the castle hill, inside the San-no-maru third enclosure but separated from the Hikone Castle main precinct by its own entrance gate. It was commissioned by the fourth Ii lord, Ii Naooki, in 1677, and completed in 1679 — so 55 years after the castle itself was finished, during the peak of the Edo kaiyū-shiki pond-stroll garden tradition. The design is credited to the domain’s resident tea-master Tobi Gennai. The name “Genkyū-en” is a Confucian classical reference to a Tang-dynasty imperial garden; the domain was signalling intellectual ambition.

The garden is a circulating-style kaiyū-shiki — one of about ninety surviving Japanese gardens of that type, where the visitor walks a continuous path around a central pond with composed views at each turning. The pond has four islands, three stone lanterns, two arched bridges, and the Hōshō-dai elevated viewing platform from which the castle reflection is best visible.

The whole circuit is about 450 metres. You can walk it in twenty minutes if you are in a hurry. I recommend an hour and a half, because the point of a kaiyū-shiki garden is that the view changes with each vantage point and rushing defeats the entire design.

The adjoining Raku-raku-en — a related private pleasure garden that was the lord’s day retreat — sits north of the Genkyū-en and is also part of the designated Scenic Beauty site. It is smaller (one pond, one tea-house, about 120 metres of circulation path) and more intimate. You can also visit the reconstructed Geishū-kan pavilion from the 1987 honmaru palace rebuild; that is inside the main castle precinct rather than in the gardens, but it sits on the original palace foundation and uses the original blueprints.

Where to visit Hikone Castle today

The main precinct and daitenshu climb

The main entrance is the Kane-no-maru gate at the south side of the honmaru, accessed from the Sawa-guchi moat bridge that you will recognise from every postcard of the castle. Opening hours are 8:30 to 17:00 year-round, with last entry at 16:45. The combined ticket for the castle plus Genkyū-en garden is ¥800 adult, ¥200 for children aged six to fifteen, and ¥1,200 for the castle + Genkyū-en + Castle Museum combined ticket (which is what I recommend — the museum is worth the extra ¥400). The combined ticket is valid for the full day; you can leave and re-enter.

The keep climb itself takes about forty-five minutes round-trip, including the 62-degree stairs between floors. There are no lifts — the castle is a heritage building and the stairs are the point. If you have mobility limitations, the ticket office can sell you a ground-level ticket that covers everything except the three keep interior floors. The top-floor view from the Hikone tenshu looks out over Lake Biwa to the west, across the Nakasendō approach to the south, and toward Sawa-yama to the east; on a clear day you can see the Suzuka mountain range.

The Genkyū-en garden

The garden entrance is outside the Sawa-guchi gate — you leave the main castle precinct through the north exit and re-enter the garden on its own ticket or on the combined. Give it ninety minutes. The Hōshō-dai viewing platform in the centre-east of the garden is the best single vantage point for the castle reflection in Gen-no-ike pond, and the best hour for light is between 10:30 and 11:30 in spring and autumn (the morning sun catches the keep straight-on from the garden side; afternoon is backlit).

The Hōtei-ken tea-house on the southeast side of the pond serves matcha and a Hikone-specific wagashi confection called igome-mochi from 10:00 to 16:00 — ¥700 for a bowl with the sweet. The pond itself hosts carp, turtles, and a local breeding population of kamo wild mallard ducks that are tame to the point of pushiness. The small boat rides from the pond’s western pier are ¥1,000 for a fifteen-minute circulation and operate from 10:00 to 15:30 in fine weather, April through November.

The Hikone Castle Museum (the Ni-no-maru palace)

The museum sits on the Ni-no-maru second-bailey platform and is a 1987 exterior reconstruction (in reinforced concrete) of the original Hikone-han palace, built for the 50th anniversary of Hikone City. Inside, the Omote-muki front portion is conventional museum layout showcasing the Ii family collection — armour, weapons, palanquins, tea-ceremony utensils, paintings, and the Ii clan historical archive. The Oku-muki rear portion is a wood reconstruction built in 1997-1998 on the original excavated foundation plan, using the original Edo-period “elevation diagram” blueprints.

The centrepiece is Ii Naomasa’s Akazonae battle armour — the lacquered-red set that Hikonyan’s helmet is modelled on — displayed in its 17th-century original alongside an explanatory set that reconstructs the Red Force cavalry company uniform. The museum also holds Ii Naosuke’s tea-ceremony implements (he was an accomplished tea-master in the Sekishū-ryū tradition before he became tairō), the 14-volume Ii Nenpu family chronicle, and the original 1854 Ansei-era repair documents for the Tenbin-yagura. ¥500 standalone or included in the ¥1,200 combined castle ticket. Allow 90 minutes.

Sawayama Castle ruins

Four kilometres east of the current Hikone Castle, on Sawa-yama hill, is the archaeological site of the castle that Ii Naomasa inherited in 1600 and abandoned before his death. The climb is about thirty minutes up a sealed trail from the Ryōtan-ji temple carpark; elevation gain is around 220 metres. At the top you will find stone-wall foundations, interpretive signage, and a small memorial stone marking the former tenshu position. The views back toward Hikone Castle and the Konki-yama hill are excellent — you can see both the historical and the modern locations of the Ii headquarters in a single photograph.

Ryōtan-ji at the base of the trail is the Ii clan family temple and holds the cremated remains of Ii Naotaka and several of his successors. A separate Ryōtan-ji sits at Iinoya in Shizuoka Prefecture — the original Ii ancestral home where Naomasa was born in 1561 — and the two temples share the Iinoya-Ryōtan name deliberately.

If you are doing a full Ii-clan pilgrimage, the Shizuoka Ryōtan-ji and the Hikone-Sawayama Ryōtan-ji are both worth the effort. For the clan origin story — why the Ii ended up in Hikone at all — see my piece on Ii Naomasa. The cross-reference is central to understanding why the Sawayama ruins matter for Hikone.

Hikonyan performance times

The mascot’s daily schedule runs three fifteen-minute performances, at 10:30, 13:30, and 15:00 in the summer season (April through October) and 10:30, 13:00, 15:00 in winter. Morning and afternoon shows usually take place at the Hikone Castle Museum courtyard; the 13:00/13:30 slot alternates between the museum courtyard and the Sawa-guchi gate area depending on the day. Check the board at the Sawa-guchi ticket window for the current day’s schedule; it is posted by 9:00 each morning. Shows are free — they are included in any castle ticket, and Hikonyan-only visits (without entering the castle) are also free.

The performance itself is modest. Hikonyan does not speak. There is no script in the traditional sense. The mascot appears, waves to the crowd, poses for photographs, and performs a light dance routine to a prerecorded theme song.

The whole thing is worth about twelve minutes of your time if you are curious, and some substantial fraction of your trip if you are travelling with children under about ten. Professional photographers are routinely there; amateur photography is welcome. Do not, however, try to hand anything to the mascot performer — the costume is rigid and cannot hold objects, and the handlers are firm about this.

Getting to Hikone

The practical entrance is JR Hikone Station on the Tōkaidō Main Line (the Biwako Line sub-branch), fifteen minutes’ walk from the castle main gate. From Kyoto Station it is 50 minutes on the Shinkaisoku express — ¥1,170 one way. From Osaka it is about 90 minutes by Shinkaisoku.

From Nagoya it is 40 minutes by Tōkaidō Shinkansen to Maibara, then 6 minutes on the local Tōkaidō Main Line to Hikone. If you are coming on the Shinkansen specifically, the natural approach is the Tōkaidō Maibara transfer rather than the Kyoto routing.

From Hikone Station you can either walk fifteen minutes along the arcaded shopping street Chūō-mall (straight west from the east exit), or take the Hikone-jōkamachi Junkai-bus sightseeing bus (¥210 flat, seasonally operated) which drops at the Hikone-jō stop right outside the ticket office. I walk it. The shopping street is pleasant and passes the Umoregi-no-ya hermitage where Naosuke spent his early life — worth a five-minute detour, open 9:00 to 17:00, ¥300 entry — and the 1600-era Hikone-han samurai residences that line the narrow side-streets off the main avenue.

For a half-day trip, I would plan four hours from arrival at Hikone Station: fifteen-minute walk to the castle, forty-five minutes for the keep climb, ninety minutes for the Genkyū-en garden, forty-five minutes for the museum, thirty minutes for the Umoregi-no-ya hermitage and the shopping street, and leave time for a late lunch at one of the restaurants along Chūō-mall. For a full day, add the Sawayama Castle ruins climb in the morning before you enter the main castle — that is an extra two-and-a-half hours with the climb and the descent — and you will have done the Ii clan’s physical geography comprehensively.

Closing

The castle that was built from three other castles is, at the end of the day, one castle. You climb the three original floors of the Hikone daitenshu and you are climbing an Ōtsu Castle tenshu that was dismantled and shortened and relocated to Konki-yama in 1604. You pass through the Tenbin-yagura and you are walking through a turret that was reputedly brought from Nagahama.

You look at the Nishi-no-maru Sanjū-yagura and you are looking at the former main keep of Odani Castle, Azai Nagamasa’s mountain-top fortress from the 1560s. You stand on the Kyushichi-ishi large-stone wall and you are standing on stones that were quarried and placed into Sawayama Castle a decade before they were moved four kilometres east to underpin the Ii clan’s new headquarters.

This is Hikone’s distinctive claim within the twelve-original survivors — and the five National-Treasure sub-group within them. It was not built from new timber on empty ground. It was built from the accumulated building stock of Oda Nobunaga’s Azuchi, Kyōgoku Takatsugu’s Ōtsu, Ishida Mitsunari’s Sawayama, and Azai Nagamasa’s Odani, all reassembled on a hill overlooking Lake Biwa by carpenters working for a seven-year-old who had just inherited the responsibility of avenging his dead father at Sekigahara.

The fourteen generations of Ii who ran it from that foundation in 1604 down to Naosuke’s assassination in 1860 and the Meiji abolition in 1871 left the building standing when almost every sister castle had fallen. Emperor Meiji’s 1878 directive saved what they built. Yoshida Shigejirō’s 1934 cherry trees made it photogenic. Mochi Ueda’s 2007 white cat with a red helmet made it a pilgrimage site.

If you are travelling in central Japan, give it a day. Pair it with the Shinkansen routing so the Maibara-to-Hikone hop is seven minutes of local train after an hour of bullet train, and you are there. Climb the keep before 11:00 if you want the morning Genkyū-en reflection on the way out; come in January if you want the snow-version photographs that the calendar industry relies on. Do not skip the Umoregi-no-ya hermitage down the street — three tatami rooms and a pine tree is where a fourteenth son waited for his life to start. And if you have a second day, take the Sawa-yama climb. You will be looking across four kilometres of flat plain at a castle that was built from the stones you are standing on.