Ogura Castle (Musashi)

Architecture, patrimoine et histoire · Préfecture de Saitama

Ogura Castle (小倉城) is a Sengoku-period mountain castle whose remains occupy a wooded ridge on the boundary of the towns of Tokigawa, Ranzan and Ogawa, in Hiki District (Saitama Prefecture). It overlooks a sharp bend of the Tsukigawa River, where the hills of outer Chichibu meet the Kantō Plain. Its origins are poorly documented: tradition attributes it either to Tōyama Mitsukage, a vassal of the Hōjō of Odawara, or to the Ueda clan, lords of nearby Musashi-Matsuyama Castle. Excavations of the main enclosure have yielded blue-and-white porcelain and fragments of tenmoku ware that date its construction to the 16th century. Its distinctive feature is its walls of stacked flat stones, taken from the very rock of the hill, a technique rare among Kantō fortresses of the period. Abandoned around the fall of the Hōjō in 1590, it has been part of the national historic site of the “Hiki castle sites” since 2008.