Matsumoto: The Black Crow Castle Saved Twice by Its Town

The reason Matsumoto Castle is still standing is that, in November 1872, a local man named Ichikawa Ryōzō bought it at auction for 235 yen, and fifty-three years after that, a schoolmaster called Kobayashi Unari noticed the entire six-storey keep was leaning sideways and went door-to-door in the old castle town raising money to push it upright again. Twice in fifty years the community bought the thing back from the brink — once from demolition by the Meiji state, once from collapse by its own weight. The black keep you climb today is the third-oldest surviving original-construction tenshu in Japan. Its beams were felled in 1596, its plaster was laid while Tokugawa Ieyasu was still consolidating the Kanto, and an army never once attacked it. The building stood, then the state tried to dismantle it, then the ground under it gave way, and on both occasions the townspeople of Matsumoto declined to let it go.

I keep coming back to Matsumoto because it is the most honest major castle in Japan. Himeji is a white masterpiece that has been continuously rebuilt and lacquered into its current perfection. Osaka is a 1931 concrete reconstruction dressed up as the sixteenth century. Nagoya is a post-war rebuild. Matsumoto is what it was in 1596, with a 1902-1913 pass of careful re-timbering under the beams and a 1950-1955 Shōwa dismantle-and-reassemble that put every original joint back where the carpenters of Ishikawa Yasunaga had put it. You are not looking at a fantasy of the sixteenth century. You are looking at what the sixteenth century built, in plaster and black-lacquered pine, with all the structural quirks of a working tenshu that never fought a battle and therefore never got the modifications that battle-damage demands. It is also, I would argue, the single most beautiful castle silhouette in Japan — and I say that having stood below Himeji and watched the sun fall on the white keep, fully conscious of how heterodox the claim is.

What Matsumoto Castle actually is

Matsumoto Castle (松本城, Matsumoto-jō) is a hirajiro — a flatland castle — built on what is now the northern edge of central Matsumoto City in Nagano Prefecture, at an elevation of 592 metres, on a level alluvial terrace between the Metoba and Susuki rivers. The keep complex sits inside three concentric moats: the inner uchibori, the middle sotobori, and the outer sōbori. Only the inner and parts of the middle moat survive today. The outer moat was filled in gradually over the twentieth century as the castle town expanded around it, which is the main reason the compound now feels smaller than its Edo footprint actually was.

The heart of the castle is the five-tower keep complex on the honmaru platform. The central daitenshu (大天守, “great keep”) is six storeys internally, five externally, 29.4 metres tall, classified by Japanese castle scholars as a bōrō-gata (watchtower-style) keep with the lower two floors forming a broad base and the upper storeys stacked above. Connected to its north-west corner by the Watari-yagura roofed passage is the Inui-ko-tenshu — literally “north-west small keep” — a three-storey subsidiary. Attached to the daitenshu’s south-east corner are two further turrets: the Tatsumi-tsuke-yagura (“south-east annex turret”) and the Tsukimi-yagura (“moon-viewing turret”). Five towers, one building, all walkable in a single circuit from the inside.

The name is the point of immediate recognition. The upper floors are clad in black lacquered wood and the lower walls wear thick black-dyed plaster under the gables. The castle has been called Karasu-jō — Crow Castle — since at least the early Edo period, in contrast to Himeji’s Shirasagi-jō (“White Heron Castle”). The contrast is not an accident. Japanese castle scholars have argued for decades about whether the black cladding reflects Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s colour preferences (the Toyotomi-era tenshu — Fushimi, Osaka, Azuchi’s lower floors — ran black) while the later Tokugawa-era keeps (Himeji, Hikone, Matsue) went white. Matsumoto was built in the Toyotomi years, and its palette tells you so.

The two things Matsumoto is most often credited for are both defensible. It is one of twelve Japanese castles with an original-construction tenshu — a keep whose main structural timbers have stood continuously since the pre-Meiji era, with no full rebuild. And within that group of twelve, its daitenshu is either the second or third oldest, depending on how you count dendrochronology against documentary dating. Maruoka and Inuyama have partisans; on the most recent tree-ring analysis — a 2019 felling-date study that isolated timbers cut in 1596 — Matsumoto’s core is 1596-1597. Inuyama has a 1585 claim that is documentary but harder to verify in the wood. Maruoka is a 1576 claim that a 1948 earthquake and subsequent reconstruction muddied. If you want a single honest answer, Matsumoto is the oldest provably-surviving tenshu by tree-ring science, third-oldest by documentary tradition. Either way, very old.

The Ogasawara foundation — Fukashi Castle, 1504

The first castle on this site was not Matsumoto and not black. It was Fukashi Castle (深志城, Fukashi-jō), a small earthwork-and-timber fortification built in 1504 (Eishō 1) by Shimadachi Sadanaga, a retainer of the Ogasawara clan. The Ogasawara had been the shugo — provincial military governors — of Shinano Province since the fourteenth century, and their main seat was Hayashi Castle a few kilometres east, near modern Susukigawa. Fukashi was a branch fort on the northern approach to Hayashi, not a headquarters. It controlled the river crossings and the Nakasendō corridor as it bent northward toward Zenkō-ji in what is now Nagano City.

The Ogasawara held Fukashi for forty-six years, and those forty-six years did not give the castle a dramatic history. They gave it a quiet one. The clan was administering a province that had roughly no central-Japan strategic weight until Takeda Shingen arrived. Shinano in the early sixteenth century was a patchwork of minor lineages — the Suwa to the south, the Murakami in the east, the Ogasawara in the centre, the Inoue and Takanashi further north — and no single lord held the province. The Ogasawara controlled central Shinano from Fukashi and Hayashi, and that was the full extent of their reach. Then Shingen came north across the Fuji River in 1542, and the whole patchwork came apart.

1550 — Takeda Shingen takes Fukashi

The fall of Fukashi happened on 27 August 1550 (Tenbun 19), and the episode is worth telling in detail because the same Takeda campaign that turned Fukashi into a Takeda outpost is the campaign that produced the decade-long rivalry between Takeda and Uesugi at Kawanakajima. Shingen had spent the preceding eight years consolidating the Kai side of the border, eliminating the Suwa clan in 1542, forcing the Suwa heiress into his bed (she produced Katsuyori, which mattered later), taking the southern Ina valley through 1544, and by 1548 turning his attention to central Shinano. The Ogasawara, under Ogasawara Nagatoki, were the largest remaining obstacle to a Takeda Shinano.

The decisive moment came earlier, at the Battle of Shiojiritōge on 19 July 1548 — a battle the Ogasawara lost badly. Nagatoki’s coalition of retainers crumbled immediately afterward: the Inoue, the Nishina, and the Ogasawara’s own sub-vassals in the Azumi valley all switched sides or went home. By the summer of 1550, Nagatoki was holding Hayashi Castle with a garrison too small to defend both it and Fukashi. Shingen’s army marched on Fukashi first, on the rationale that taking the northern outpost would cut Hayashi’s communication with the Uesugi-controlled north. The 27 August 1550 fall of Fukashi was not a battle in the proper sense — the Ogasawara abandoned the fort rather than hold it, and Shingen’s men walked in. Hayashi fell days later. Nagatoki fled north to the Uesugi.

Shingen installed Baba Nobuharu — one of his senior “Twenty-Four Generals” — as castellan of Fukashi. Baba held the castle for twenty-two years, and during those years he did what a competent Takeda general did at every Shinano outpost: he rebuilt. The surviving stone-wall traces in the outermost compound appear to have been laid by Baba’s engineers, and several of the large stones in the daitenshu’s base — which were presumably reused in the 1590s rebuild — may have come from the Takeda-era fortifications. The Fukashi that Ishikawa Kazumasa inherited in 1590 was a Takeda castle, not an Ogasawara one. For more on the man who took it, see my separate piece on Takeda Shingen — Fukashi was one stop in the much larger Shinano annexation programme that defined his middle career.

1582 — the Takeda collapse and the brief Ogasawara return

The Takeda held Fukashi for thirty-two years. Then Shingen died in 1573, his son Katsuyori shattered his army at Nagashino in 1575, and by March 1582 Oda Nobunaga’s son Nobutada was inside Kai Province burning everything that could be burned. Takeda Katsuyori committed suicide on 11 March 1582, and in the three months between his death and Nobunaga’s own death at Honnō-ji in June, the Takeda territorial system came apart in pieces. Each former Takeda holding got reassigned to an Oda retainer, and Fukashi fell into the portfolio of Mori Nagayoshi, a young and competent Oda general who had not yet formed any particular relationship with Shinano.

Nagayoshi barely had time to unpack. When Akechi Mitsuhide killed Nobunaga at Honnō-ji on 21 June 1582, the Oda grip on the recent Takeda conquests evaporated within a fortnight. The former Takeda retainers in central Shinano reorganised themselves under whatever authority they could find — in Fukashi’s case, that authority was the Ogasawara again. Ogasawara Sadayoshi, a nephew of the Nagatoki who had fled in 1550, returned to Matsumoto with Uesugi Kagekatsu’s backing and retook the castle. He then switched his political allegiance to Tokugawa Ieyasu within two years, as every smart central-Japan warlord eventually had to. It is Sadayoshi who renamed the castle Matsumoto (松本, “pine root”) from Fukashi. The received tradition — the ja.wiki version, which I find plausible — is that the new name drew on the pine trees already around the compound and on a homophonic play with matsu-moto (“to wait for the true [lord]”), the true lord at that point being Ieyasu.

1590 — Ishikawa Kazumasa arrives

In the seventh month of 1590 (Tenshō 18), Hideyoshi completed the Odawara campaign, destroyed the Hōjō, and promptly reassigned the political geography of the entire Kantō-Shinano-Tōkai region. Tokugawa Ieyasu was moved out of his Mikawa-Tōtōmi-Suruga base into the newly conquered Hōjō territories — the so-called Kantō utsuriyuki, the Kantō transfer — and everyone attached to Ieyasu went with him. This opened up all of central Japan for fresh assignments. The Ogasawara Sadayoshi, who had been a Tokugawa man, followed Ieyasu east into Kōzuke. Matsumoto needed a new lord.

Hideyoshi’s choice was Ishikawa Kazumasa. Kazumasa had been one of Ieyasu’s senior retainers for thirty years — he had fought at Okehazama as a young man, served through the Mikawa-Suruga consolidation, and been one of the Tokugawa’s chief diplomats with the Toyotomi in the 1580s. Then in 1585, in one of the more startling Sengoku-era defections, he had abandoned the Tokugawa for Hideyoshi. The precise reasons are still debated — the contemporary rumour was that Honda Tadakatsu, his former colleague, had suspected him of embezzlement; the modern scholarship tends to the view that he was Hideyoshi’s covert recruitment, placed inside the Tokugawa command structure, and that the Honda quarrel was cover for an orderly defection once his cover was blown. What matters for the castle is that Hideyoshi now had a former Tokugawa senior officer needing a domain, and Matsumoto was the domain on offer — 80,000 koku, centrally placed, politically useful as a buffer against Ieyasu’s new Kantō holdings.

Kazumasa arrived at Matsumoto in the autumn of 1590 and immediately began a major rebuild of the castle. He was sixty years old, he had been given a high-status domain as reward for his defection, and he wanted to build something that would last. But he did not finish the job himself. He died in 1592 at the age of sixty-two, with the main works still in progress. The tenshu you see today was built — in its entirety — by his son Ishikawa Yasunaga, who inherited both the domain and the unfinished castle.

1593 to 1596 — Yasunaga builds the tenshu

The old received date for the Matsumoto tenshu’s construction was 1593-1594, based on stylistic analysis and a handful of documentary references in the Matsumoto-han Shoko-ki and related han records. In 2019 a team from the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties conducted a full dendrochronological analysis of the daitenshu’s structural timbers. The result was unambiguous: the major beams were felled in 1596, with some secondary members in 1597. This means the tenshu itself was built a few years later than the traditional dating — probably raised 1596-1598. The broader castle precinct (the moats, the honmaru platform, the stone walls, the Inui-ko-tenshu and the Watari-yagura) was likely finished earlier, in the 1593-1595 window that the documentary tradition records, with the daitenshu built last as the capstone building. Either way, the Ishikawa father-son pair — Kazumasa 1590-1592, Yasunaga 1592-1613 — are the men responsible for the castle as it stands.

The design logic of the Matsumoto tenshu repays attention because it was novel for its moment. The building is classified by castle scholars as renketsu-fukugō-shiki — “connected-complex style” — meaning the main keep is joined to subsidiary turrets by covered passageways, and the whole forms a single defensible unit. Only five surviving Japanese castles have this arrangement (Himeji, Matsumoto, Nagoya originally, Kumamoto originally, Matsue), and Matsumoto is the earliest. The inspiration, almost certainly, was Azuchi — the Nobunaga castle on Lake Biwa whose seven-storey tenshu had a lower subsidiary attached by a passage, a configuration Ishikawa Kazumasa would have seen with his own eyes during his Tokugawa service. Matsumoto reads as a deliberate quotation of that pre-1582 architectural vocabulary.

Two further features deserve note. First, the lower floors of the daitenshu have no external windows on the north face and only narrow slit windows elsewhere — a darkness that the Japanese castle literature calls musha-gaeshi (“repels the warrior”). The building was designed to be almost impossible to take from the north, the direction from which a hostile army was statistically most likely to arrive. Second, the daitenshu is tied into the Inui-ko-tenshu by a passage that is itself fortified — the Watari-yagura has firing slits on both sides, so that a defender caught between the two towers can still shoot out. The whole five-tower complex reads less like a keep and more like a small castle-within-a-castle, complete with its own internal defensive logic.

1613 — the Ōkubo scandal and the Ishikawa fall

Ishikawa Yasunaga finished his father’s castle and then, in 1613, lost everything in a scandal that almost no modern tourist at Matsumoto has heard of. The Ōkubo Nagayasu jiken — the Ōkubo Nagayasu incident — was one of the largest political purges of the early Edo period. Ōkubo Nagayasu was a senior Tokugawa rōjū-adjacent official with responsibility for the shogunate’s mineral mines, and when he died in April 1613 his heirs made the serious mistake of concealing part of his estate from the bakufu. Ieyasu’s investigators discovered the concealment, prosecuted it aggressively, and expanded the investigation to include everyone who had been close to Nagayasu in life.

Ishikawa Yasunaga was one of Nagayasu’s in-laws and had done business with him. The details are murky and the contemporary sources preserve multiple versions, but the outline is this: Yasunaga was stripped of his Matsumoto domain in August 1613, exiled to another minor holding, and the Ishikawa line was effectively removed from the top tier of Tokugawa vassalage. The 80,000-koku Matsumoto domain was reassigned. The castle — with the black tenshu barely twenty years old — passed out of Ishikawa hands and into the possession of Ogasawara Hidemasa, a grandson of the Nagatoki who had fled in 1550. The circle closed. Three generations after the Takeda drove them out, the Ogasawara walked back into Matsumoto.

The Edo-era lord sequence — Ogasawara, Toda, Matsudaira, Mizuno, Hotta, Matsudaira again

Matsumoto’s Edo-period lord sequence reads like a short textbook on the routine politics of the bakufu reassignment system. Ogasawara Hidemasa held the domain from 1613 to 1617, then was moved to Akashi in Harima and replaced by Toda Yasunaga (no relation to Ishikawa Yasunaga — the name collision is one of Matsumoto history’s genuine traps). Toda held it from 1617 to 1633 and began the first major programme of peacetime additions: the original eastern residential wing, the restoration of some of the inner gates, and the initial designs for what would become the Tsukimi-yagura. His successor in 1633 was Matsudaira Naomasa, a grandson of Ieyasu via Yūki Hideyasu, whose brief tenure produced the actual Tsukimi-yagura — the moon-viewing turret — as a tacked-on peacetime wing that broke the defensive logic of the main keep in favour of a room specifically for looking at the moon. You can read it as a deliberate statement that warfare was finished.

After Matsudaira Naomasa’s brief run, the lordship passed through the Hotta clan (1638-1642), the Mizuno clan (1642-1725), and finally back to the Toda-Matsudaira line, who held the domain from 1725 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The Mizuno tenure is worth a note: it was during their time, in 1725, that the honmaru palace burned down, and the Mizuno never rebuilt it. From 1725 onward the castle compound had a tenshu without a matching residential palace, which is why the 1868 castle the Meiji authorities inherited was already partly a shell. The domain administration had shifted to a separate complex of buildings in the ninomaru — the second enclosure — where surviving Edo-period foundations still exist in the current castle park.

The Matsumoto lords were, on the whole, middle-rank Tokugawa vassals who collected their rice, maintained the road infrastructure, sent their delegation to Edo on the sankin-kōtai schedule every other year, and did not make trouble. Matsumoto sat on the Nakasendō, which meant that every lord returning from Edo to western Japan — and every shogunal inspector, court envoy, and Dutch trade delegation — passed through the castle town. The sankin-kōtai system kept Matsumoto prosperous for two and a half centuries and made the castle the single most-photographed daimyō compound on the corridor well before photography existed. The absence of any siege in the castle’s active service is therefore not an accident — the Tokugawa system deliberately kept the lords too financially drained to contemplate rebellion, and the castle’s physical immobility was the proof.

1872 — the auction

The Meiji government’s Haijō-rei (castle abolition edict) of January 1873 was a piece of administrative tidying-up that came close to losing Japan roughly fifty of its surviving Edo-period castle keeps. The edict classified the nation’s castles as either “existing” (sonjō — to be preserved as military garrisons) or “abolished” (haijō — to be demolished, materials auctioned). Matsumoto was classified as abolished. The physical dismantling was to be carried out by a government-appointed auctioneer, who would sell the timber and stone to the highest bidder. The schedule called for work to begin in November 1872 — before the edict was formally promulgated, under the preliminary cantonal regulations.

On 16 November 1872, the daitenshu was sold at public auction. The buyer was a local administrator and former low-ranking samurai of the abolished Matsumoto domain named Ichikawa Ryōzō, and the price was 235 yen and change. The figure is routinely quoted in Japanese-language sources; the English literature often mis-translates it or rounds it. For context, 235 yen in 1872 was roughly the annual salary of a middle-grade school-teacher. Ichikawa did not have 235 yen of his own. He paid for the tenshu with the receipts from a local prefectural industrial exhibition (hakurankai) he had organised the previous autumn and the funds from a public subscription among Matsumoto townspeople who did not want their castle demolished. The city bought the keep from the state, at auction, with exhibition proceeds and donations.

Ichikawa’s rescue was not the end of it. The Meiji authorities had only sold the keep itself — the daitenshu. The other four towers of the complex, and most of the outer gates, were demolished in 1873-1875. The Kuromon outer gate, the Taiko-mon, the various yagura around the honmaru perimeter, all of the ninomaru residential buildings — gone, their timber sold for building material, their stone carted off to shore up Matsumoto’s new roads. What survived was the five-tower keep complex (the daitenshu, Inui-ko-tenshu, Watari-yagura, Tatsumi-tsuke-yagura, and Tsukimi-yagura — these five, because they were physically interlocked and Ichikawa had bought the central building that anchored them all) and not much else. The compound you see today is five original towers ringed by 1960s-1990s reconstructions of everything outside them.

1902 — the tilt

Having saved the keep from the state, Matsumoto almost immediately began losing it to the ground. The tenshu had been built on the alluvial soil of the honmaru platform without the deep-pile foundation that later castle-builders used. The 16th-century solution was to lay a dense mat of horizontal timbers under the stone base — a noki-ishi raft — that would distribute the weight evenly across the soft substrate. This worked as long as the timbers stayed dry and intact. Over the three centuries since construction, the timbers had rotted in places. By the 1890s, visitors were reporting that the keep was visibly leaning to the north-east.

The critical moment came in 1902. An inspection by the Meiji government’s heritage authorities found that the tenshu was leaning at an angle serious enough that collapse was within the realm of possibility. The state, having already sold the castle, had no legal obligation to fix it. The repair would have to come from the city. And the city did not have the money. At this point the man who saved the tenshu for the second time entered the story. Kobayashi Unari (小林有也) was the principal of the Matsumoto Middle School — what we would now call a headmaster — and had been watching the castle’s tilt progress for years. In 1902 he organised a Matsumoto-jō Tenshukaku Hozon-kai (Matsumoto Castle Keep Preservation Society), went door to door in the old castle-town wards, and raised sufficient subscription money to commission a full structural engineering survey.

The survey, conducted in 1903 by engineers from the Imperial University at Tokyo, found that the tenshu’s 16th-century timber raft had rotted in its north-east quadrant — exactly where the visible tilt was worst — and that a proper repair required partial dismantling and re-timbering of the base. The work took ten years. It began in 1903 and ran through to 1913, and for much of that decade the daitenshu was encased in scaffolding with one or another section missing. The engineering solution was to replace the rotten timber mat with a modern reinforced-concrete-and-timber hybrid foundation. The cost was about 13,500 yen — nearly sixty times Ichikawa’s 1872 purchase price, adjusted and otherwise — and was met by sustained public subscription, Kobayashi’s society having turned itself by 1905 into a national fundraising body with branches across the country.

Kobayashi did not live to see the work finished. He died in 1912, a year before completion. His subscription society handed the rebuilt tenshu over to Matsumoto City in 1913 as a gift. In 1930 the tenshu was designated a National Treasure under the pre-war heritage framework. In 1952 — under the revised post-war Cultural Properties Protection Law — it was redesignated as a National Treasure along with its four attached towers, making all five interconnected structures National Treasures collectively. What you climb today was saved, twice, by two men who between them managed to assemble the modern-Japan equivalent of a community-funded rescue fund, across a generation.

1950 to 1955 — the Shōwa dismantle-and-rebuild

The final piece of the modern-era story is the Shōwa-no-daishūri — the Shōwa Great Restoration — which ran from 1950 to 1955 and was the single most extensive conservation project the castle has ever undergone. The Kobayashi 1903-1913 work had stabilised the foundation but left the upper timber structure essentially as it had been. By the late 1940s, fifty years on, a fresh problem had emerged: the timber joints in the upper floors were loosening, the lacquer cladding was deteriorating, and the whole keep needed a comprehensive inspection that could only happen by taking it apart.

The plan, agreed between Matsumoto City, the national Cultural Properties Commission, and a panel of architectural historians led by Sekino Masaru of Tokyo Imperial University, was to dismantle all five towers down to the foundation, inspect and repair each structural member individually, and reassemble the whole thing. This was the first post-war conservation project of a castle tenshu in Japan. The work was done in stages: the Inui-ko-tenshu in 1950-1951, the Watari-yagura in 1951-1952, the daitenshu in 1953-1954, the Tatsumi-tsuke-yagura and Tsukimi-yagura in 1954-1955. Every beam was numbered, removed, examined, repaired or replaced where decay required, and returned to its exact original position. Where timbers could not be saved, replacement members were cut from pine felled in the same districts the Ishikawa carpenters would have used — the Kiso valley, the Shinshū interior.

The Shōwa restoration is also when the castle’s black cladding was restored to its original specification. Between roughly 1870 and 1950, the lacquer had been sporadically patched and the black plaster had faded. The Shōwa project replastered and relacquered the whole exterior to the Ishikawa-era colour scheme — the deep black you see now, which Matsumoto City refreshes every winter. The current re-lacquering cycle is an annual late-December to early-February operation, which is why if you visit between Christmas and Valentine’s Day you will often find one or two sections of the keep under scaffolding. The work is done by hand by a small team of traditional urushi-lacquer specialists from Nagano Prefecture, and it takes six weeks.

Architectural details — what to look for when you climb

The climb up the daitenshu is six floors, which in practice means six very steep wooden staircases, each at an angle close to 61 degrees. Matsumoto’s stairs are the steepest of any surviving Japanese tenshu by a noticeable margin, and they are that steep for a defensive reason — a man climbing a 61-degree staircase with a sword cannot easily draw it, and a defender at the top of the stairs can drive him down with very little effort. The stairs are the same pine timbers the Ishikawa carpenters laid in 1596. You are climbing the exact wood.

On the second floor you will find the gun museum (teppō-gura) — the Akahane collection of 16th-to-19th-century matchlock firearms and armour, which was donated to the castle by a private collector in 1991. It is the single most important matchlock collection in Japan. The pieces range from the earliest hinawajū made at Kunitomo and Sakai in the 1570s through mid-Edo hunting pieces to Bakumatsu-era experimental rifled designs. If you have any interest at all in Sengoku military technology, the second floor is a stop of twenty minutes or so. If you do not, you can move through it. Either is fine.

The fourth floor is the one that gets the most architectural attention, because it is where the keep’s interior layout shifts from fortified to residential. The floors below are long, open, windowless rooms designed for defenders and storage. The fourth floor has a raised jōdan-no-ma (lord’s platform) — a six-tatami elevated room where, theoretically, the Ishikawa lord would have sat to observe the lower floors during a siege. This is the one floor where the castle functioned, in its design logic, as a noble residence rather than a fortification. In practice, the room was almost certainly never used for that purpose, because the castle was never under siege. But it was built to be used that way, and the symbolism matters.

The top floor — the sixth — is the one you are climbing for. The windows on all four walls open (all four directions, all four of them) and the view is the full circuit of the Matsumoto basin with the Northern Alps to the west. The ceiling is a 26-panel coffered gō-tenjō, which means you can stand in the middle of the room, look up, and count the panels, and that lattice is the same 16th-century carpentry that the Ishikawa overseer approved when the keep was built. The fourth-floor lord’s platform is symbolic; the sixth-floor ceiling is mechanical. Both are original, and neither has been replaced in the 430 years since construction. The tatami matting in the lord’s room is renewed on a cycle; the timber structure is not.

The 2019 Kanma Yagura reconstruction, the moats, and the castle today

The reconstruction programme that has been running at Matsumoto since the 1960s is slow, meticulous, and honestly advertised. Where a structure is being rebuilt from surviving plans, Matsumoto City puts up a sign saying so. The Kuromon inner gate went up in 1960, the outer gate in 1990, the Taiko-mon in 1999, and in 2019 a small lower turret at the south-west corner of the honmaru — the Kanma-yagura — was added from Edo-period drawings. The result is a compound where the five original National Treasure towers are surrounded by a carefully-reassembled set of peripheral structures that are authentic in plan but twentieth- and twenty-first-century in actual timber.

The moats remain the part of the castle that most visitors under-appreciate. The inner moat is the original sixteenth-century water body, carp-stocked (the koi you see are technically a post-1950 restocking, but koi have always been kept in the moat), roughly two metres deep, and walkable on all four sides by a public path that opens at dawn. The second moat is partially filled but still visible to the south. The outer moat is mostly gone but is traceable in the street pattern — many of central Matsumoto’s north-south streets follow the line where the old outer moat ran, which means if you walk the town in the morning and pay attention to the slight changes in street width, you can still read the Edo-period castle town’s geometry in the modern city.

A last note on what Matsumoto is not. The castle never witnessed a major siege — I have said this several times because it is the single most important architectural and historical fact about the building. The closest thing to a combat action in its four-hundred-year history was a brief period of anxiety during the 1600 Sekigahara run-up, when Ishikawa Yasunaga quietly maintained a loyal-to-Tokugawa posture while Ieyasu’s allies passed through. No army attacked it. No besieger scaled it. Which is why the whole complex has the structural integrity of an untested building — every beam is original because no beam ever had to be replaced after damage. This is also why the Shōwa restoration was so important: once you accept that the castle has never been fought in, the rot and subsidence of the foundation become the only real threats the building faces. The Kobayashi and Shōwa projects addressed both, and the keep you climb is the longest-continuously-standing original castle tenshu in Japan precisely because nobody ever shot it.

Where to visit Matsumoto Castle today

Matsumoto Castle grounds and the daitenshu climb

The castle compound is open daily from 8:30am to 5:00pm, with last entry to the tenshu at 4:30pm. The ticket is ¥700 for adults and ¥300 for children, and that combined ticket includes both the castle climb and the Matsumoto City Museum (Shiritsu Hakubutsukan) on the ninomaru grounds. The only closure days are 29 to 31 December — the castle stays open through the New Year holidays, which is when the enormous kadomatsu pine-and-bamboo decorations go up at the Kuromon gate. The end-of-year dates are closed for the lacquer maintenance cycle, which runs January through mid-February.

The visit circuit is a one-way flow: you enter through the Kuromon outer gate, cross the honmaru courtyard, enter the base of the daitenshu from the north-west corner, climb through the Inui-ko-tenshu and the Watari-yagura first, then up through the six floors of the main keep, then down through the Tatsumi-tsuke-yagura and the Tsukimi-yagura, and exit at ground level on the east side. Expect the full circuit to take ninety minutes, not counting time in the second-floor gun museum or the upper-floor exhibition rooms. In high season (April cherry blossoms, October autumn colour, and the week of Golden Week) the climbing staircases are a slow-moving queue and the full circuit can take closer to two and a half hours.

Practical advice for the climb. Wear socks without holes — you remove your shoes at the entrance and carry them in a plastic bag issued at the entry point, and you will be walking on bare pine for an hour. The staircases are steep; hold the handrail. There is no disabled access to the upper floors — the tenshu is the same building it was in 1596, and no elevator has been installed (deliberately, to preserve the structural authenticity). Visitors with mobility limitations can still enjoy the honmaru courtyard and the moat walk, but the keep climb itself is not currently accessible. Water and toilets are at the Kuromon entry point, not inside the tenshu. In summer, the interior temperature can reach 35 Celsius.

Matsumoto City Museum (Shiritsu Hakubutsukan)

The Matsumoto City Museum sits in the ninomaru grounds just east of the castle and is included in the combined ticket. It occupies a modern building that opened in October 2023, replacing the previous museum that had stood on the honmaru ground near the keep. The new building runs two permanent galleries — the “Matsumoto Domain and Castle Town” gallery covers the Edo-period lord succession and the 1872 auction in considerable detail, with English captions; the “Crafts and Daily Life” gallery covers regional traditional industries including the Matsumoto temari (thread balls), lacquerware, and the Susuki family washi papermaking. Allow an hour for the museum if you are doing it properly.

The museum’s single most interesting exhibit, for the castle visitor, is the 1902 reduced-scale model of the keep showing the tilt angle at the point Kobayashi Unari commissioned the survey. The model was built by a Matsumoto Middle School carpentry teacher as a teaching aid during the 1903-1913 fundraising campaign. It captures the keep’s precise lean at about 1.5 degrees off true — enough to be visually obvious, not yet enough to guarantee collapse. Standing in front of the model you get a visceral sense of what the townspeople were raising money to prevent.

Matsumoto Timepiece Museum

A ten-minute walk south of the castle on Nawate-dōri, the Matsumoto City Timepiece Museum (Matsumoto-shi Tokei Hakubutsukan) is the kind of quirky small-museum stop that adds to a castle visit without competing with it. The collection is the private accumulation of a local watchmaker who donated roughly 300 mechanical and pendulum clocks to the city on his death in 1974, with subsequent additions bringing the total to over 550 pieces. The museum’s western side has a direct view of the castle, which is the justification for visiting as part of the castle circuit rather than on its own — you can drink a coffee in the museum café looking at the keep across the old Sotobori line.

Entry is ¥310 for adults, 9am to 5pm, closed Mondays. The largest clock in the collection — a nineteenth-century Vienna regulator pendulum clock over two metres tall — runs on a continuous maintenance cycle that one of the museum staff rewinds every three days. If you happen to be there during the winding, it is worth ten minutes to watch.

Kaichi School (Kyū-Kaichi Gakkō)

Walk eight minutes north of the castle, across the former outer moat line, and you arrive at the Kyū-Kaichi Gakkō — the Former Kaichi School — which is the oldest Western-style elementary school building in Japan. It was built in 1876, four years after Ichikawa’s rescue of the castle, in the full first flush of Meiji “civilisation and enlightenment” architectural experimentation. The building is a deliberate hybrid: a Japanese carpentry crew building a pseudo-European structure under a Japanese tile roof, with stained glass and clock tower elements they had seen in Western books. It was designated a National Treasure in 2019, which makes Matsumoto one of the few Japanese cities with two National Treasure buildings in the same walking circuit.

The school is genuinely interesting in its own right — not a second-tier castle-town accessory — and if you have Matsumoto for a full day, the pairing of the 1596 castle and the 1876 school is a cross-section of what Japan was doing with its built environment over three hundred years. The same community that bought its feudal castle back from the state in 1872 was, within four years, also building a modernist experiment in education that would later be imitated across the country. Entry is ¥400, 9am to 5pm, closed Mondays. The main schoolhouse is under restoration until late 2026 — the adjacent former teacher’s lodge is open in the interim and contains a small exhibition on the building’s architectural history.

Seasonal visiting — cherry blossom, autumn colour, winter snow

The castle photographs four ways through the year, and each has partisans. April cherry blossom is the most popular window — the inner moat is ringed by roughly sixty mature Somei-yoshino, the peak bloom typically falls 13-20 April, and the castle runs a night-lighting programme for the blossom week where the keep is floodlit in soft amber against the pink. The crowds during peak bloom are serious, and you will queue to cross the inner bridge. I find the week before peak bloom — the “falling-bud” phase, when the trees are about 70% open and the wind is starting to strip the earliest flowers — genuinely more photogenic than the peak itself, and noticeably less crowded.

Autumn colour (kōyō) runs from late October through the third week of November. Matsumoto’s surrounding trees are mostly Japanese maple and oak, which turn together into the deep red-gold combination the tourist brochures show. The castle moat maple line peaks slightly later than the Alps behind it — you want the last week of October for the Kamikochi-Norikura mountain colour, the first week of November for the castle foreground. Both can be combined into a two-day itinerary with an overnight at Kamikōchi in the Alps or at one of the ryokan at the Utsukushigahara-onsen hot springs thirty minutes east of the city.

Winter snow is the connoisseur’s season and my personal preference. Matsumoto gets less snow than, say, Kanazawa or Takada, but in a good year — mid-January through late February — you can get a clean snow cover on the grounds that makes the black keep look deliberately composed against it. The 7 February 2014 snowfall (pictured above) was a once-in-forty-years event, but the more typical 10-20 cm of accumulation a few times each winter produces a less dramatic but still beautiful effect. The one caveat is that the keep itself is occasionally under scaffolding in January and early February for the annual lacquer maintenance — check the city website before booking a specifically-winter trip if the unblemished exterior matters to you.

Getting there

From Tokyo, the direct train is the JR Azusa limited express from Shinjuku Station, which takes 2 hours 40 minutes to Matsumoto Station and runs roughly hourly from 7am to 8pm. The reserved seat ticket is about ¥6,800 one-way; JR Pass holders can use it for the cost of the reservation. The Azusa is the civilised choice — it runs through the Kiso valley and past the Yatsugatake mountains, and the scenery from the right-hand window is worth the ride on its own. From Matsumoto Station, the castle is a 15-minute walk along Daimyōmachi-dōri, or you can take the retro-styled Town Sneaker bus (¥200) which runs a loop around the old castle town and stops at the castle grounds.

An alternative route from Tokyo is via the Hokuriku Shinkansen to Nagano (1h25), then the JR Shinonoi Line from Nagano to Matsumoto (1h). The total door-to-door time is about the same as the Azusa, but the shinkansen leg is substantially faster and smoother, and the Shinonoi connecting train runs hourly. If you are coming from Kanazawa or anywhere else on the Hokuriku line, this is the route. From Nagoya, the Shinano limited express runs north through the Kiso valley in 2 hours 5 minutes. From Osaka, the Thunderbird shinkansen-plus-Shinano combination is roughly four hours.

The castle is a half-day site if you do the keep and the City Museum; a full day if you add the Timepiece Museum, Kaichi School, and the moat walk with lunch in one of the Nawate-dōri soba restaurants. If you have a second day in Matsumoto, the two obvious additions are Kamikōchi (2 hours by bus, the Hotaka range, the Taishō-ike pond) and the Matsumoto Pinot Noir wineries of the Yamabe valley (30 minutes by local taxi; three small producers, all drop-in welcome). Neither is the castle, but both are good. The castle is the reason you came.

The community that would not let it fall

I opened with Ichikawa Ryōzō and his 235 yen, and Kobayashi Unari and his door-to-door subscription, because the single most important thing to understand about Matsumoto Castle is that it is the only major surviving Japanese castle whose continued existence is the result of direct community action twice over, against official state indifference. Himeji was preserved by the army because it was useful as a garrison. Hikone was preserved because the Ii family used their Meiji-era political capital to protect it. Nagoya was lost in 1945 and rebuilt in 1959 as a civic project, which is not the same thing. Matsumoto was bought at auction by a townsman with exhibition receipts and subsequently re-foundation-ed by a schoolmaster with a donations book. The state, in both cases, was the problem or a bystander, not the solution.

When you stand below the daitenshu in the snow or the cherry-blossom light and notice how the black lacquer catches the season’s colour behind it, what you are looking at is the consequence of those two acts of civic commitment. If Ichikawa had not bid 235 yen in November 1872, the keep would be building material in the walls of a Meiji-era post office somewhere. If Kobayashi had not walked his old students’ parents’ doors in 1902, the keep would have collapsed at some point between 1910 and 1925 and been recorded in the archives as a regrettable structural loss. The building stands because the town refused, twice, to let it go. The black silhouette above the koi moat is a thing that cost two generations of Matsumoto citizens their money and their time. Go up the stairs. Pay attention to the worn treads. The marks are from four centuries of people who felt the same way.