Mito Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Set between the Naka River to the north and Lake Senba to the south, Mito Castle occupies the eastern tip of a plateau that its builders divided into four enclosures running east to west, from the Shita-no-maru to the Sannomaru. Home to the Mito branch of the Tokugawa, one of the shogunate's three collateral houses, it is striking for its lack of stone: Ibaraki Prefecture notes that it had neither a keep nor masonry walls, and the city of Mito ranks its earthworks among the largest in Japan for an earthen castle. A tower with three outer levels, ravaged by the great fire of 1764 and rebuilt in 1766, was lost in the air raid of 2 August 1945. The city then absorbed the site: a high school stands on the honmaru, other schools on the ninomaru, and the JR Suigun Line runs along a former moat. In the third enclosure, the Kōdōkan, the domain school founded in 1841 by Tokugawa Nariaki, retains its main building, the Shizendō and its gate. The Yakui-mon, attributed to the Satake period and presented as the only surviving old structure, was moved to the honmaru; the specialist site Jcastle considers its connection with the castle uncertain. Since 2020, the Ōte-mon gate and the ninomaru corner tower, rebuilt after excavations and research into old plans and photographs, have given the castle a visible presence again near the station.