Kawagoe Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Kawagoe stands out less for its defenses than for a civil building that has become exceedingly rare: according to the city, it is one of only two surviving honmaru palaces in Japan. Built in 1848 for the daimyō Matsudaira Naritsune, the complex then comprised sixteen buildings and about 1,025 tsubo. All that remains is the entrance with its great karahafu gable and the large main hall, along with a councillors' lodging (karō zumesho) with an eventful history: sold in 1872 to a family in the village of Fukuoka, it was brought back and restored in the late 1980s, some forty meters east of its original location. The castle itself dates to 1457, when Ōta Dōshin and his son Ōta Dōkan raised it on the orders of Uesugi Mochitomo of the Ōgigayatsu branch. It later became the prize in the night battle of Kawagoe, which in 1546 consolidated the Hōjō position in the southern Kantō. Under the Tokugawa it guarded the northern approach to Edo, and its custody went to high-ranking officials of the shogunate; eight families and twenty-one lords succeeded one another there, according to the city. The palace survived through a series of reuses reported by the encyclopedic summary: Iruma prefectural office, public hall, annex of the tobacco monopoly, martial arts hall, then school premises. Now attached to the municipal museum, it stands alongside more discreet traces of the castle: earthen ramparts, the site of the Fujimi turret and the Naka-no-mon moat.