Odawara Castle

Architecture, patrimoine et histoire · Préfecture de Kanagawa

Standing on a hill at the foot of the Hakone mountains, facing Sagami Bay, Odawara Castle was for nearly a century the capital of the Later Hōjō, one of the great warrior houses of the Sengoku period. Taken around 1495 by Ise Sōzui, known as Hōjō Sōun, it became the heart of a vast network of fortresses covering the Kantō. Its earthworks and ditches withstood Uesugi Kenshin in 1561 and Takeda Shingen in 1569, before Toyotomi Hideyoshi forced the Hōjō to surrender in 1590 after a three-month siege. Rebuilt on a smaller scale under the Tokugawa by the Ōkubo and Inaba clans and repeatedly damaged by earthquakes, it was dismantled at the beginning of the Meiji era. The present reinforced-concrete keep was raised in 1960 on the old stone base and renovated in 2015-2016; it houses a museum devoted to the castle's history and offers a view of the sea from its top floor. The Tokiwagi, Akagane and Umadashi gates, reconstructed between 1971 and 2009, and the flower-filled park around the moats make the site one of the major attractions of Kanagawa Prefecture.