Nakagusuku Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Set on a promontory in central Okinawa, about 16 km north of Naha, the Nakagusuku site looks out over both the bay of the same name and the Pacific to the east and the East China Sea to the west. Six enclosures follow one another in a line, closed by coral limestone walls that exceed ten metres in places. The World Heritage nomination file identifies three ways of laying the stone, in horizontal courses, in hexagonal blocks and in irregular blocks, evidence of successive enlargements, while the corners use larger, dressed blocks. The site's management body credits the first masonry to the line of earlier Nakagusuku lords in the mid-14th century; the UNESCO file instead favours the last years of that century, with an enlargement in the mid-15th. In 1440 Gosamaru, moved from Zakimi by royal order, added the third enclosure and the northern one, which takes in a well and strengthened the castle's ability to withstand a siege. His defeat in 1458, in an attack attributed to Amawari of Katsuren, opened a long administrative phase: a domain of the court, an appanage of the crown prince around 1470, and the seat of a district office from 1729. Members of the Perry expedition surveyed the site in 1853, and Heine left four sketches of it. The prefecture stresses that the fortress escaped the destruction of the Pacific War, whereas the village administrative buildings inside the enclosure were lost to fire in 1945.