Fukuoka Trip 3 -　Kumamoto Castle Honmaru Goten - 熊本城の新本丸御殿

Despite being tired from the night before, last Saturday I had to get up early and rush to Hakata station.  My friend 久ちゃん and I had made plans to go to the nearby City of Kumamoto (熊本市) in the neighboring prefecture.

先週末福岡の旅行時、友達は博多駅で会った、一緒熊本市電車で行った。もちろん僕は日本のお城大好きから、熊本城へだった！

Hakata station (current end point of the Sanyo 'Bullet' Train) is a big mess right now.  they're in the middle of a multi-year renovation and expansion.  When its done the ' Kyushu Shinkansen' line will connect here with the main Shinkansen line that goes to Tokyo. 

Next stop: Kumamoto Prefecture -

about 1 hour later we were in Kumamoto City,  which relative to the rest of Japan is a smaller city of 1.5 million... they still have street cars.   We rode the street car a few blocks to get to our destination...  which any of you who know me (or at least look at my photo album) can guess,  was Kumamoto Castle...

Thats 久ちゃん,  you may remember her from such Etchy blog entries as this one and this one.  oh and she's standing in front of a statue of Katō Kiyomasa (加藤清正), Feudal lord who built the Castle here in the early 1600's.

A quick walk across the moat and through the gates and we're at the foot of the castle's defenses:

Quite an imposing site for an uninvited guest (or out of shape tourist there on a humid summer day!

Kumamoto's castle is one of Japan's biggest and most famous.  It has one of the most developed set of defensive structures including many moats, walls, towers and gates.

[Castle nerd tip - notice how the slope differs on the two walls?  the one on the right is older and is sloped less,  the one on the left was built later and is steeper, reflecting the improved construction techniques that had been developed in the interim]

僕は5回ぐらい熊本城行ったことが有る、如何して僕は今回も一度行きたかった？6週前新ビルを復元したー本丸御殿ですね。僕は熊本城初めて2003年でした、2004年から御殿ビルを建っていた。さき今年ゴルデンウェーク時新御殿を開けた！それから楽しみ待っていた！本丸御殿は熊本本天守に同じ時焼け落ちた。西南戦争時だった。

They recently celebrated the 400th anniversary of the construction of the original tower (donjon, also known as tenshu ).  The last time I was here was new years eve 2007, they did a special countdown event to mark the 400th year.

In total have been to Kumamoto castle like 5 times since my first trip to Japan in 2003, so why did I want to go again?

In 1877 during the Seinan rebellion most of the castle's original buildings were destroyed in a fire.  In the 60s they made a replica of the original castle tower (seen above) --except made out of concrete and with a museum built inside.  Thankfully nowadays the trend seems to have shifted to doing the rebuilding in the original style - out of original materials using original building techniques (of course they cheat a bit and use cranes now though).

But since 1999, they've been on an extensive reconstruction effort to restore the rest of the castle to its original glory -- and one of the biggest parts of that project, which started construction in 2004 JUSTfinally finished about 6 weeks ago, the opulent Honmaru Goten palace building:

(its hard to get a good picture from the bottom, let's go around the back go up to the homaru (本丸) - aka the innermost walls of the castle.

[When I first visited in 2003 they were still excavating the original building's foundations,  in feb. 2005 they built a metal roof over the site to protect the area from rain while they work... by Oct 2005 they had most of the roofup but it took until April 2008 to finish the work inside... needless to say after  five years of waiting to see how it turned out, I was growing impatient!]

We came up to a new entrance too that wasn't here before - so my first view of the new palace building wasn't the inside, it was actually the bottom - they redid one gate that actually comes underneath the new palace building.

An underground passageway goes under the palace building and then comes out the 'front' to the main courtyard in front of the castle tower.

That's the rebuilt 1960's castle tower.  Its an impressive structure, not quite as tall as Osaka Castle's, but still pretty cool. Now its a museum full of old swords and suits of armor, etc.

And of course the requisite model of the what the castle used to look like... hypothetically they want to rebuild all those buildings I guess.

A quick run up a few dozen flights of stairs and we're at the top of the tower:

The photo on the right is taken on the back side - its is the Udo Yagura ( 宇土櫓) - a five story turret building) -- this is the biggest of the original buildings that survived the fire that destroyed the tower and palace (since i have been in it many times, we skipped it this time). :-P

Bonus shot -

nice attention to detail on the roof tiles. :-P

Anyway, enough of this, let's get on to the new Honmaru Goten Palace -( 本丸御殿大広間)

This was the best shot i could get from the tower,  someone put that stupid tree in the way!    needless to say its quite large and still brand new looking...  

We went down to the front entrance, everyone has to take off their shoes and stay on the carpet:

the first half has a bunch of displays and information about the history of the original building and the restoration project....  and of course the requisit model!  This is what the original complex of buildings looked like,  unfortunately they've only remade the center ones (with the slightly darker roof - mouse over to figure out which is which).

The path eventually takes you to what was originally the kitchen area of the palace.  Since everything in Japanese traditional buildings is made of highly flamable materials (wood, rice paper and straw tatami mats), the cooking areas are usually easy to spot...

This room was quite large and had a vaulted ceiling and a nice staff member to explain everything:

unfortunately you can't go upstairs (i guess thats where the shogun bedrooms were. :-P

Personally as an engineer, I enjoy studying the traditional japanese construction techniques visible in the open beams visible in a place like this. 

In an adjoining room they had a few hands-on displays of how beams could be joined without using nails:

its a bit tricky to slide the two blocks into place, but once you do, there's just enough space to fit a wooden peg in,  locking them together.

The main part of the building is taken up by a super long O-Hiroma reception hall (actually a series of adjoining rooms with tatami mats:

The castle lord would sit down at one end and his visitors, staff, guards, lackeys, etc would fill in the rest of the room (the more important you are, the closer to the front you get to sit. Japanese measure the area of rooms by # of tatami mats (畳),  this whole space is 60畳.

You're not allowed to take photos of the fancy Shokun room ( 昭君之間) at far end, but this is a photo i found online:

This is where the Daimyo sat, so it gets the royal treatment - fancy painted screens and a fully laquered and gold adorned roof. 

There's a fancy virtural reality tour available here to see it in its full glory:

http://www.manyou-kumamoto.jp/users/goten/goten.html

They had a video showing how much effort it took to make the building and specifically the Shokun room.   The whole time I was thinking 'wow, how much did all this frickin' cost?'... well through the power of the internet,  i found the answer is....  US$50 million! (54億円)...

  nice hallway that faces the palace's courtyard... 

More official website pics here:

http://www.manyou-kumamoto.jp/contents.cfm?id=650(click around for some floor plans and cool pictures taken during the reconstruction)

Finally we took a side trip to the lower level outside of the inner bailey to stop by Iidamaru (飯田丸) Yagura, which was also rebuilt, finished about 2 years ago:

That tree is supposed to be about 800 years old, so its actually been here twice as long as the castle.  impressive!

This turret building is not small, but nothing compard to the height of the tower or the size of the palace.  The nice thing about this place is that its far enough away that none of the tour groups come down to see it,  so it was completely empty except for us and a volunteer security guard:

You can take your time and enjoy the feeling of walking around in a 16th century style feudal Japan style castle building (without the screaming kids or the slow Obachans).

I always tell people that if (when) i'm super-rich, the first thing i will do is have my dream mansion constructed like this... in traditional Japanese castle style...  

except i think i'll leave the gun ports out,  probably gets drafty. :-P

I actually have three more pictures from Kumamoto castle i want to share, i'll save them for a 2nd blog... :-P