Numata Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Numata Castle overlooks two rivers, where the mountain roads to Echigo and Aizu emerge. Numata Akiyasu built the Kurauchi-jō here in 1532, after about three years of work according to the city. The stronghold then passed to the Uesugi, to the Hōjō, and finally to Sanada Masayuki, who seized it in 1580. His quarrel with the Hōjō led, after Toyotomi Hideyoshi's arbitration of 1589 and the Nagurumi affair, to the Odawara campaign; in 1590 the domain went to Sanada Nobuyuki with 27,000 koku. He raised a five-storey keep in 1597, a date for which the municipal chronology also gives a variant of 1607. Texts record its plan as nine by ten ken. The story then stopped abruptly: after Sanada Nobutoshi was dismissed in 1681, the castle was razed the following year and its moats filled in on the shogunate's orders. The Honda then rebuilt a residence there with shogunal aid, followed by the Kuroda and the Toki until the Meiji era. In 1916 the businessman Kume Taminosuke, a native of Numata, acquired the land and turned it into a park, which was given to the community in 1926. Visible today are the stone base of the western turret, fragments of the walls and moats of the honmaru, and a 1983 bell tower housing a replica of the bell cast in 1634 under Sanada Nobuyoshi; the original is in the city's history museum.