En un regard
Le château en bref
Horikoshi Castle is a lowland castle in the city of Hirosaki. The place name appears as early as 1337, in connection with a work called a tate whose exact nature remains unknown. The Tsugaru ittōshi, compiled in 1731, makes this the starting point of the 1571 attack on Ishikawa Castle led by Tamenobu, then lord of Ōura and breaking away from the Nanbu. The turning point came in 1594. Recognised by the Toyotomi authorities around 1590-1591, Tsugaru Tamenobu thoroughly reworked the site and moved his seat there, relocating retainers, temples, shrines and merchants to it. Horikoshi remained the centre of Tsugaru for seventeen years, until the move to Takaoka, the future Hirosaki, in 1611 under Nobuhira.
Excavations carried out by the city between 1998 and 2013 have clarified this late sixteenth-century state. The castle is organised around a pentagonal honmaru, surrounded by a ninomaru, a sannomaru, an outer sector, the komaru and a northern enclosure, all defended by earthen ramparts and moats. The most important building uncovered is a hiroma, or audience hall, set on foundation stones, in a castle that had neither stone walls nor tiled roofs. The excavations also showed that one entrance to the sannomaru was deliberately filled in at the time of the move to Hirosaki. Added in 1985 to the national historic site of the Tsugaru clan castles, Horikoshi has been developed as a historic park since 2012 and has been fully open to the public since April 2020.
