Hizen Nagoya Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Hizen Nagoya Castle has nothing to do with its namesake in Owari: it stands at Chinzei-machi Nagoya, in what is now the city of Karatsu, Saga Prefecture. Toyotomi Hideyoshi had it built from late 1591 to serve as headquarters for the Korean campaigns of 1592-1598. The work, shared among several daimyō, is said to have taken only a few months, and the layout is traditionally credited to Kuroda Kanbei. What sets the site apart is its scale: around an enclosure of about 17 hectares, the mobilized lords set up their own camps, so that national protection extends over 73.1 hectares, 55.9 of them for the camps. The total number of these camps varies by publication, from 118 to more than 150. A folding screen protected at prefectural level, held in the neighboring museum, depicts the castle, its town and its port. Excavations have located the keep, its cellar, foundation stones and gilded roof tiles, along with at least thirteen buildings in the honmaru and traces of a rustic teahouse linked to Hideyoshi's Yamazato-maru. Abandoned after 1598 and then deliberately dismantled in the early Edo period, the fortress can now be read in its broken stone walls and the base of its keep, a landscape of demolition preserved as it was, which the prefectural authorities present as the largest Momoyama-period site in Japan.