Iwatsuki Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

The mystery of Iwatsuki begins with its founder. A commemorative stele carved in the early Shōwa era attributes it to Ōta Dōkan; a regional economic report (Bugin Report, 2018) tentatively mentions Ōta Dōshin and his son; Wikipedia, for its part, follows a more recent attribution to Narita Jikōsai, whom municipal documents associate with the site without specifying his role. The city of Saitama declines to decide and confines itself to a foundation at the end of the Muromachi period. It does, however, take care to dismantle the charming construction legend of two cranes alighting on a marsh and bundles of bamboo used to fill it. The story is late, shaped in the nineteenth century, and excavations in the central area found no trace of such infill. The verifiable history is that of a contested castle: the Ōta held it until 1567, followed by the Hōjō of Odawara, who strengthened its defenses with a hallmark of their craft, the partitioned moats known as shōji-bori. Around 1587 a great enclosure of earth and moats, the Ōgamae, some 8 km long, encircled the castle and town; in 1590 the stronghold fell to the Toyotomi army in the fifth month of the lunisolar calendar, not without fierce fighting. Under the Tokugawa, Iwatsuki remained until Meiji one of the guardians of northern Edo, held by a succession of fudai families. Today the park preserves the Shin-kuruwa and Kaji-kuruwa enclosures, with their ramparts and dry moats, while the surviving gates recall the Ōoka era.