Oshi Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Built on a marshy plain, Oshi owes its reputation to a paradox: it held out thanks to the very water meant to submerge it. The Narita, who raised it in the late fifteenth century according to the city of Gyōda, relied on this hard-to-cross terrain; four generations, from Akiyasu to Ujinaga, lived there until 1590. That year, while the head of the house, Narita Ujinaga, was at Odawara, troops led by Ishida Mitsunari besieged the castle and built against it a dike whose length tradition sets at 28 km. The operation ended without the castle being taken by force: the city states that the dike gave way and that the castle opened its gates only after the collapse of the Hōjō. This resistance fed the nickname "floating castle" and, in the twenty-first century, Wada Ryō's novel, adapted for the screen as Nobō no shiro. The story needs qualifying, however: recent work, relayed by the encyclopedic summary, stresses Toyotomi Hideyoshi's role in the decision to flood the site and calls into question the image of Mitsunari as sole master of the operation; the episode of the woman warrior Kaihime belongs to tradition. Under the Tokugawa, Oshi became the seat of a domain entrusted successively to Matsudaira Tadayoshi, to the Abe and then, from 1823, to Matsudaira Tadataka and his successors. The castle was demolished in 1873. The local museum stands beside a Gosankai-yagura reconstructed in 1988 on a different site from the original; only a few earthen ramparts are original.