Yamagata Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

In the heart of present-day Yamagata, at the tip of an alluvial fan, lies a vast flatland castle with three enclosures. Its origins are tied to the arrival in 1356 of Shiba Kaneyori, sent as a military representative to the north of the country; his line would later take the name Mogami. The date refers to a residential settlement rather than a fortress of documented form. The turning point came with Mogami Yoshiaki (1546-1614), who between the Bunroku and Keichō eras laid out three concentric enclosures ringed by moats and earthen ramparts, about 1.6 km from east to west, while the castle town grew to the east. His domain reached 570,000 koku. During the fighting of 1600 around Hasedō, the castle is said to have been hidden by mist, which is the city's explanation for the nickname Kasumi-ga-jō. The dispossession of the Mogami in 1622 opened a long period of instability: Torii Tadamasa, to whom the works still visible in the Ninomaru are attributed, then a succession of houses down to the Mizuno, on ever-shrinking revenues. Designated a national historic site in 1986, with an extension in 1987, the site has become Kajō Park, where the eastern gate of the Ninomaru and the Ichimonji gate of the Honmaru have been reconstructed and where several museums stand side by side.