Koga Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Almost nothing visible remains of Koga Castle, and that is precisely what makes it unusual: one of the great political centres of medieval Kantō has vanished beneath the embankment and bed of the Watarase River. Set on a promontory surrounded by water and marshland, the site was chosen in 1455 by Ashikaga Shigeuji, who, in the midst of the Kyōtoku War, moved his seat here from Kamakura and established the line of the Koga kubō, which stayed in this place for more than 120 years according to the city's documents. In the Edo period it became the seat of a domain entrusted to daimyō close to the Tokugawa, and a stopping place for the shoguns' pilgrimages to Nikkō. In 1633 Doi Toshikatsu had a tower with three outer storeys erected, some twenty metres high, which served as a keep. Dismantled after 1873, the castle was later largely erased by the Watarase River regulation works begun in 1910, which swallowed its south-western half and its honmaru. Only fragments remain: earthworks and a stretch of moat near the history museum, built on the former Suwa-kuruwa, with bayonet-shaped angles once designed for flanking fire on attackers; a gate moved to Fukuhō-ji temple; and markers and stelae recalling the location of the honmaru.