Takeda Castle
Interesting facts
- The castle's fame is recent: an amateur photographer's pictures of the ruins above a sea of cloud, printed in 2007 including on a national newspaper's front page, sparked the boom.
- After a Google television advertisement featured the ruins in December 2013, the number of visitors in a year jumped to around 600,000.
- In 1989 a temporary keep, main gate and walls were built on the ruins as sets for the samurai epic Heaven and Earth.
- The ruins also stood in for Hara Castle in the 2003 film Makai Tenshล and appeared in the 2012 Takakura Ken film Anata e.
- The three wing enclosures were laid out at almost exactly 331 metres, about 20 metres below the 351-metre main enclosure, evidence of careful vertical planning.
- Its stone walls cover about 8,649 square metres, yet a 1970s repair campaign needed to rebuild only around 1,000 square metres of them.
- Every enclosure is ringed in stone, and the castle is regarded as one of the last early-modern fortresses built on a mountain summit.
- Archaeologists have traced six quarries that supplied the wall stones, four of them close to the summit itself.
- In 1468 the garrison sallied out and defeated an invading Hosokawa army at Yakuno, killing two of its commanders; a memorial stone still stands on the Yakuno plateau.
- Excavations have yielded far more roof tiles here than at any other castle in Tajima, including fragments of shachi fish ornaments from the rooftops.
Why it is worth it
On a bare ridge high above the Maruyama valley, the stone walls of Takeda Castle trace the outline of a fortress that no longer stands. In autumn, mist rising from the Maruyama River often fills the valley at dawn, leaving the ruins floating on what looks like a sea of cloud. That image earned the site its popular names, the "castle in the sky" and the "Machu Picchu of Japan", and the classic view of it is from Ritsuunkyล, a hillside across the valley to the south-east.
The castle crowns Mount Kojล, about 353 metres high, also called Torafusu, the crouching tiger, after the shape of its plan. It was founded in the mid-15th century, traditionally in 1441, by ลtagaki Mitsukage, a retainer of the powerful Yamana clan, to guard the border with the rival Akamatsu and the routes to the Ikuno silver mine. After Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaigns brought the region under his control, the castle passed to Akamatsu Hirohide, who rebuilt it entirely in stone. His fortunes ended with the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600: having switched to the Tokugawa side, he was accused of burning the town below Tottori Castle during its siege and was ordered to commit seppuku. Takeda was abandoned, but its walls were left largely intact.
What survives is one of the largest and best-preserved mountaintop castle sites in Japan. The enclosures run about 400 metres north to south and 100 metres east to west, with the base of a three-storey keep near the centre and three wings of terraces, the North and South Senjลjiki and the Hanayashiki, fanning out along the ridges at almost the same level. The walls are built in the Anล style of unmortared stonework, fitted from natural stones, and reach more than 10 metres at the main enclosure. The ruins were designated a National Historic Site in 1943 and are listed among Japan's Top 100 Castles.
Getting there
The castle rises above the Takeda district in the Wadayama area of Asago, about 4 km from central Wadayama. Takeda Station on the JR Bantan Line lies at the foot of the hill, about an hour's steep walk below the ruins. The nearest airport is Konotori Tajima Airport (TJH), about 24 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Takeda Castle was a Sengoku period Japanese castle located in the Wadayama neighborhood of the city of Asago, in the northern part of Hyลgo Prefecture, Japan. It is located north of Himeji, and north-west of Kyoto, and is situated some 353 metres above sea level It is often referred to locally as the "Machu Picchu of Japan". The castle was destroyed during the Sengoku period, only its foundations and stone walls remain. The ruins have been protected as a National Historic Site since 1943.
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