Ōtaki Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

In the centre of the Bōsō Peninsula, Ōtaki owes its place in history to the moment in 1590 when Tokugawa Ieyasu, barely settled in the Kantō, sent one of his most famous generals, Honda Tadakatsu, there to keep the Satomi of Awa in check. The site was not new: the tradition reported by tabi-mag points to Mariyatsu Nobukiyo in 1521, and the prefectural museum places in the mid-sixteenth century the occupation by four generations of the Masaki, vassals of the Satomi, at Odaki, the medieval spelling of the name. What visitors see today is deceptive: the white tower, raised from 1973 to 1975 on the honmaru, is a reinforced-concrete building designed as a museum and based on a plan of 1835. Nothing certain is known about the silhouette of any original keep, and some even doubt that one ever existed. The authentic witnesses lie elsewhere: the great well and the yakuimon gate, both attached to the prefectural protection of the honmaru, the former still feeding local tales about its depth. A European visitor left a rare outside view: Don Rodrigo, passing through in 1609, describes the defences and wealth of the stronghold. After the Honda came the Abe, Aoyama and Inagaki, then a Matsudaira branch, until the abolition of the domains. The museum building, closed since late 2021 to be brought up to standard, can only be seen from the outside.