Hirado Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Set on the Kameoka hill, some fifty metres above the port of Hirado, this castle owes its character to a history of disappearances and returns. A first fortress, Hinotake, was built here in 1599 by Matsura Shigenobu, only to be lost to fire in 1613. For nearly a century afterwards the Matsura governed their domain from a simple residence, the Otate, now the Matsura Historical Museum. The return to a castle came only in the early eighteenth century, when the shogunate granted, as an exception for a tozama daimyo, a rebuilding that municipal publications explain in part by the favour the family enjoyed with the shogun Tsunayoshi. The work was completed in 1718. The site overlooks the Hirado Strait, gateway to a trade with the Portuguese, Dutch and English that had made the clan's fortune before withdrawing to Nagasaki in the 1630s and 1640s. Dismantled in 1872, the stronghold retains two older elements, the Tanuki turret and the Kita-Koguchi gate. The keep seen today, raised in 1962, has no original model: the eighteenth-century citadel had none, a three-storey turret serving in its place. It houses a renovated museum display, while the Kaijū turret of the ni-no-maru has been fitted out for overnight stays.