Iwasaki Castle (Dewa Province)

Architecture, patrimoine et histoire · Préfecture d'Akita

North of Yuzawa, on the left bank of the Minase River, Iwasaki Castle occupies the tip of a hill rising some thirty metres above the former Iwasaki post station on the Ushū road. A satellite of Yuzawa Castle, it was held by the Iwasaki, a cadet branch of the Onodera clan charged with guarding the north of its lands. After the territorial settlement of 1590, the Mogami claimed Ogachi District; in 1595 Mogami Yoshiaki's army, led by Tateoka Mitsushige, marched on Yuzawa, and Iwasaki fell in a night assault in which its last lord, Iwasaki Yoshitaka, was killed. Entrusted to Harada Daizen and then held by the Mogami, the site passed to the Satake after their arrival in 1602. The layout remains legible: an L-shaped main enclosure, a second enclosure whose turret platform bears the Myōken shrine, and a third enclosure containing the "egg well". Laid out as Sennen Park, it has at its foot the jinya building of the Iwasaki Domain, a small Satake principality established here between 1869 and 1871.