Hachigata Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Between the Arakawa River and the Fukazawa stream, a cliff-edged promontory carries one of the great castle sites of the Sengoku period in the Kantō region. The notice written for its national protection in 1932 already described it as one of the few complexes of that age to have survived almost intact in the region, and that judgment still shapes a visit today: there is no keep here, but a military landscape that can be read in the open air, made up of earthen ramparts, moats and fortified gate forecourts. The site's origins are linked to Nagao Kageharu, at a date on which official sources differ: Bunmei 5 (1473) in the national notice, Bunmei 8 (1476) according to the tradition followed by the municipality. Its present form owes more, however, to Hōjō Ujikuni, a son of Hōjō Ujiyasu who married into the Fujita family and enlarged the castle into a pivot of control over the northern Kantō. The final episode came in 1590: for more than a month, according to the municipality, some 3,500 men held out against over 50,000 attackers led notably by Maeda Toshiie and Uesugi Kagekatsu, before a negotiated surrender spared the garrison. Excavations carried out from 1997 to 2001 provided the basis for restoring the second and third enclosures and the Sasa enclosure; the stone-based wall and four-pillared gate seen there are therefore reconstructions, to be distinguished from the old earthworks. A municipal museum in the outer enclosure presents the site.