Sakura Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

On a spur of plateau rising some thirty metres above the Inba lowlands, Sakura presents the image of a great Tokugawa fortress built without stone walls: its defences rely on earth, dry moats and water. According to the tradition reported by the city, the site already held an unfinished stronghold attributed to Kashima Mototane, of the Chiba sphere of influence, in the Tenbun era. Doi Toshikatsu, installed in 1610 on the orders of Tokugawa Ieyasu, began in 1611 to turn it into a castle meant to shield Edo from the east. The municipality readily calls it the “castle of the rōjū”: nine of its lords sat on the shogunate's council of elders, a record it claims for the whole country. Among them was Hotta Masayoshi, who at the end of the Edo period led the negotiations with the American envoy Harris and welcomed to Sakura the physician Satō Taizen, founder of the Juntendō in 1843. The army moved into the enclosure in the Meiji era, removed the towers and gates, and kept infantry regiments there until 1945; the 57th would be wiped out on Leyte. Today the municipal park lets visitors read the plan on the ground itself: honmaru, earthen ramparts, deep moats and water-filled outer baileys, while the National Museum of Japanese History, opened in 1983, occupies part of the former military land. tabi-mag names the earthwork entrance defence near the Shiigi Gate as the only restored feature.