Matsumoto Castle
Interesting facts
- The keep looks five storeys tall from outside but holds six floors inside, making it the oldest surviving keep built with a hidden storey.
- The concealed, windowless floor is thought to have served as a safe store for food and gunpowder and a refuge for samurai during battle.
- It is one of only twelve original castle keeps surviving in Japan and was designated a National Treasure in 1952.
- Only five Japanese castles hold National Treasure status: Matsumoto, Himeji, Hikone, Inuyama and Matsue.
- Five of its buildings are National Treasures in their own right, including the small northern tower, the connecting passage and the moon-viewing turret.
- The castle began as Fukashi Castle, built in the early 16th century by Shimadachi Sadanaga of the Ogasawara clan.
- According to legend, the keep's noticeable lean was the curse of Tada Kasuke, a peasant leader executed after protesting unfair taxes in the Jōkyō uprising.
- The second floor of the keep houses the Teppo Gura, a collection of matchlock guns, armour and other weapons.
Why it is worth it
Most of Japan's famous castles are white — plastered walls that read as pure and imposing from a distance. Matsumoto is black, clad in lacquered board, and that's not an aesthetic accident: the castle sits on flat ground with no natural cliff or mountain to hide behind, so its defenders leaned on a wide moat and thick walls instead, and dark lacquer that both weatherproofed the timber and made the fortress look severe. Locals nicknamed it Karasu-jō — the Crow Castle.
The six-storey main keep dates from the 1590s rebuild under Ishikawa Kazumasa, but attached to it is a moon-viewing turret — an open-sided pavilion added later purely so the castle's occupants could sit out and watch the moon over the water. It's an odd thing to find bolted onto a building designed around killing zones and arrow slits: proof that by the time it was added, the castle's owners had stopped expecting to be attacked and started using their fortress as a pleasant place for an evening drink.
In 1872 the new Meiji government auctioned off the castle, a move that would almost certainly have meant demolition; a Matsumoto resident named Ichikawa Ryōzō organised fellow citizens and ran fundraising expositions on the castle grounds to buy the tower back for the city. That bought time, not permanence — by the early 1900s the keep was in such poor structural shape it was close to collapse, and it took a second campaign, led by schoolteacher Kobayashi Unari and his Matsumoto Castle Preservation Society from 1901, raising roughly 20,000 yen from donors nationwide, to fund the "great Meiji renovation" of 1903–1913 that finally stabilised it.
Best time to visit
Cherry blossom season, late March into April, is when the black keep reflected in the moat against pink blossom draws the biggest crowds — arrive early for a clear view.
Getting there
Located in Matsumoto. Shinshu-Matsumoto Airport (MMJ) is about 9 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
Matsumoto Castle , originally known as Fukashi Castle, is a castle in city of Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. It is one of Japan's premier historic castles, along with Himeji and Kumamoto. It was the seat of Matsumoto Domain under the Edo Period Tokugawa shogunate.
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