A brief primer on Japanese castles (for those who are curious)

note: If you have no interest in Japanese castles,  please skip this blog! :-P

In the comments to my recent blogs about my most recent Japanese castle trips, Flagday asked some good Q's about Japanese castles,  I thought people may want to hear the answers too, hence this blog:

How do they do the reconstruction?  

In the 50's and 60's when they started doing post-war reconstructions of some of Japan's larger city's castles.  At that time they made a lot of the reconstructed towers out of modern materials (ie steel reinforced concrete framing, etc).   A good example of this is Kumamoto Castle in Kyushu.

But more recently, it seems the trend has been to go back to original materials and techniques (ie wood, mud, plaster, etc).   This is Ozu castle, which was rebuilt like 5 years ago in Shikoku:

Obviously the wood ones are nicer!

When did the castles become ruins?  

Depends on the castle of course.  Some were burnt down by accident over the centuries (in a country with a long history and lots of wood buildings, LOTs of famous buildings in Japan burnt down and rebuilt (sometimes many times each!)

Some were destroyed in actual war over Japan's turbulent history (my favorite castle  Kumamoto Castle for example,  was seiged and destroyed in the Seinan War, the historical events somewhat close to the story of 'The Last Samurai', except there was no Tom Cruise).

Of the surviving ones,  a lot were also dismantled or neglected after the Meiji restoration (when Japan modernized). 

And of the ones that survived all that,  a LOT more were destroyed in WWII.... (beacuse at the end of the day they're still giant wooden buildings!)  

The most graphic example of the castles destroyed in WWII was the original Hiroshima castle, which is only a few hundred yards from the famous ' Atomic Bomb Dome'.

This is the rebuilt version of Hiroshima Castle, taken from across the moat.

Are there any surviving complete castles? 

There are apparently 12 castles that still have the 'original' towers ( here's a list),  plus many more sites that still have some 'original' buildings on the grounds. (so depends on what your definition of 'complete' is...)   Many of these are smaller castles, but a few are bigger ones too.  The most famous one being Himeiji Castle, a world heritage site:

Which i visited back in 2006.

Including Himeji, I've visited 5 of the 12 of these 'original tower' ones:

Matsue, Marugame, Hikone and Matsuyama (going clockwise from the top left)

Of course these 'original' towers have also been fixed up more than once over the years.  Himeji's castle tower was completely stripped out in the 50s and much of its interior timbers were replaced, but hypothetically the outer shell is at least 'original'.

Are there 18th/19th century drawings which would allow an accurate reconstruction? 

In many cases there are.   Or even better, some have photos taken of the originals.   A good example is Kumamoto castle, which wasn't destroyed in the 1877.   Before that a lot of photos were taken of the original castle: Click here for more original photos.

Obviously not all are accurate recreations of the original.  Some have expanded balconies for tourists, some are smaller than the original due to budget constraints.  All now include retrofitted sprinkers and fire extinguishers.

On your quest how many castles/ruins have you seen and how many are left on your list? 

According to this Japanese language Castle site, there are something like 2200+ castle sites in Japan, (and a few Japanese fortresses that were built by Japanese armies in occupied portions of Korea in the 17th century too!)  Probably 95% of those 2200+ are just barely visible ruins of small castles on random mountain tops (maybe a few foundations stones left at best).     Personally I've visited something along the lines of 30 different castle sites so far (original, reconstructions, ruins, etc). 

In 2007 I found this map of 'major' castle towers (original and reconstructed) at a castle's museum and I marked all the ones I had visited up to that time.  Visited ones were marked with a small red dot. Obviously since I lived in the South part of Japan, I'd mostly covered those ones only.

An up-to-date listing of the ones I've visited can be found here in my ' Japanese Castles I've Visited' photo album. Hope this has been somewhat educational for the readers! 

If you want to know more, I can recommend some sites to check.  First you can start with Wikipedia's page on Japanese castles (its been expanded a great deal recently):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_castle

Another excellent resource, which I have contributed to is 'jcastle.info' -

http://jcastle.info

Check those out.  If you finish with those, there are a ton of other sites too. just google!