Nihonmatsu Castle

Nihonmatsu Castle stood in what is now Kasumigajo Castle Park from 1414 to 1868. The castle was occupied by a series of daimyo throughout the Warring States period (1467–1568) before being granted to Niwa Mitsushige, first daimyo of the newly established Nihonmatsu domain, in 1643. Mitsushige and his descendants ruled from the castle until 1868, when it was destroyed in the Boshin War between the Tokugawa shogunate and an alliance of powerful domains determined to overthrow it.

From Mountain Fortress to Modern City

Nihonmatsu Castle was one of many “mountain castles” built on elevated, defensible sites during the Warring States period, but during the more peaceful times of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) most daimyo moved into more convenient dwellings on lower ground. The Niwa daimyo, however, kept their residences and administrative buildings within the original castle walls. This necessitated some unconventional layout decisions, such as building on multiple levels due to a lack of flat space.

Mitsushige took a keen interest in civic planning, seeing it as key to the domain’s strength. He reorganized the settlements outside the castle walls into a town whose basic layout is still visible in Nihonmatsu today. He also ordered the construction of the Nigoda Conduit, a series of channels and pipes that brought vital water to the castle and its town from sources in the mountains some 18 kilometers away.

The Birth of Kasumigajo Castle Park

After the Boshin War, the former castle grounds served as the site for a silk mill before being renamed Kasumigajo Castle Park and planted with flowers and trees for the citizenry to enjoy. The park contains preserved and reconstructed walls, buildings, and gardens that shed light on Nihonmatsu Castle as it was in centuries past.

The highest point of the park is the honmaru (main compound), which was the first part of the castle to be completed. It is surrounded by stone walls, some of which date to the late sixteenth century. The tenshudai (keep foundation) inside the honmaru never housed an actual keep, but offers panoramic views of the land around Nihonmatsu. The lower levels of the park contain other features like the Senshintei tea house (the oldest surviving structure on the site), the recreated Minowa Gate, and a Japanese-style garden dating from the mid-seventeenth century.

The Heart of Nihonmatsu

The castle grounds still play an important role in civic life in Nihonmatsu, hosting events like the Chrysanthemum Festival, in which local horticulturalists display dolls covered in specially cultivated flowers. Minowa Gate is the starting point for a paradeon the last night of the Lantern Festival, when towering floats covered in lanterns trundle through the streets accompanied by festival music.

Niwa Mitsushige could not have foreseen how the area would develop centuries after his time, but his planning laid the foundations for modern Nihonmatsu, with the castle site still at its center.

The History of Nihonmatsu Castle

The history of Nihonmatsu Castle reflects the history of Japan’s transition to modernity. From the high ground above the city, it saw the fierce conflict of the Warring States period (1467–1568) settle into the long peace of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), which in turn was ended by the Boshin War (1868–1869) that cleared the way for the modern state.

A Mountain Fortress

The first incarnation of Nihonmatsu Castle was completed in 1414. It was built by Hatakeyama Mitsuyasu, a local daimyo whose family had been sent to the region a century earlier as provincial deputies of the Ashikaga shogunate. Mitsuyasu’s castle occupied only the very top of the mountain and was protected by walls of packed earth rather than stone, prioritizing defensibility over comfort.

The Hatakeyama family resided in the castle for more than a century, but were forced out in 1586 by Date Masamune, a powerful daimyo from the north. Conflict had long been simmering between the Date and the Hatakeyama, but the death of Masamune’s father during a botched kidnapping by the Hatakeyama brought matters to a head. The Hatakeyama family recognized inevitable defeat and fled, torching the castle as they went.

Modernizing the Castle

In 1590, Toyotomi Hideyoshi—by then the most powerful daimyo in Japan, well on his way to ruling the whole country—reassigned Nihonmatsu Castle to the daimyo Gamo Ujisato. Ujisato set about modernizing the castle, building the first stone walls around the honmaru (main compound).

After Hideyoshi’s demise in 1598, Tokugawa Ieyasu established a shogunate that would rule Japan until 1868. In 1627, the shogunate reassigned Nihonmatsu Castle to the Kato family of daimyo, and they continued Ujisato’s project, building the stone walls surrounding the san-no-maru (outer compound) lower down the slopes.

The Niwa Daimyo and Beyond

In 1643, the Tokugawa shogunate declared Nihonmatsu a domain and appointed Niwa Mitsushige as its first daimyo. Mitsushige began his tenure by remaking the town outside the castle walls along more orderly lines. The basic layout of the castle town is still preserved in today’s Nihonmatsu. The Tokugawa era was largely peaceful, and Mitsushige and his descendants ruled from the castle for more than two centuries.

In 1868, an alliance led by powerful domains from western Japan took up arms against the shogunate in what was called the Boshin War. Nihonmatsu entered the war on the shogunate’s side, but was helpless against the western alliance’s modern weaponry and tactics. The domain was overrun and Nihonmatsu Castle was burned down for the second time.

After the shogunate’s defeat, domains and daimyo were abolished under the new Meiji government. The former grounds of Nihonmatsu Castle were occupied by a silk mill and then by a public park. Until excavation and restoration efforts began in the late twentieth century, little remained of the castle but a few half-buried stone walls. Nevertheless, the history of the castle shaped the city of Nihonmatsu in ways that are still being unearthed.

Nihonmatsu Castle through the Seasons

Spring and Summer

Kasumigajo Castle Park is renowned for its cherry blossoms. A Sakura (Cherry Blossom) Festival is held from April to May each year, with live music and other attractions. Throughout the spring and summer other flowers bloom in their turn, including violets, wisteria, and hydrangeas. All of these were planted after the castle grounds became a public park, representing a new stage in the castle’s history as a treasured part of the community.

The Lantern Festival

The Lantern Festival, held over three nights starting on the first Saturday in October, lights up the city of Nihonmatsu as the heat of summer recedes, giving way to autumn. Seven huge floats covered with lanterns and carrying festival musicians playing flute and percussion roll through the city. Each float is some 11 meters high and covered with 300 paper lanterns with real candles inside. These require constant replacement by attendants who nimbly clamber over the float to reach lanterns as their candles go out. By the end of the night, more than 1,500 candles have been used by each float.

The festival dates to 1664, when it was begun by Niwa Mitsushige. Each of the seven floats comes from a different neighborhood in Nihonmatsu. On the last night of the festival, a paradeof the floats leaves from the castle’s Minowa Gate.

Autumn Chrysanthemums

When the castle’s foliage turns gold and red in autumn, it is illuminated by night along walking paths opened to residents and visitors. From mid-October to late November, Kasumigajo Castle Park also hosts Nihonmatsu’s annual Chrysanthemum Festival. This event is renowned for its life-sized dolls and dioramas covered in or made entirely from chrysanthemums. Each year has a theme, and participating horticulturalists and teams compete to create the most elaborate and beautiful displays on that theme.

The modern Chrysanthemum Festival was founded in 1955, but chrysanthemum cultivation as a hobby originated with the samurai of Nihonmatsu Castle, who held shows to demonstrate their mastery of the art. The tradition evidently survived the fall of the castle itself, as visitors in the early twentieth century noted that the chrysanthemum shows in Nihonmatsu were “the best in the prefecture.”

In winter, fallen snow blankets the park and gives it a quieter, more contemplative air. The honmaru offers clear views through the crisp air of Mt. Adatara and the other mountains to the west, whose slopes are also covered in deep snow.

The Stone of Admonishment

An 8-meter-tall stone stands on the eastern edge of Kasumigajo Castle Park, at the former site of the gate samurai passed through when entering or leaving the castle grounds. Inscribed on the stone are four lines of poetry:

Your wages and your stipend

Are the people’s grease and sweat.

To oppress the people is easy,

To deceive heaven is not.

This admonishment to domain samurai to treat the people of Nihonmatsu with respect was inscribed on the stone in 1749 by order of Niwa Takahiro, fifth daimyo of the Nihonmatsu domain. Takahiro was a reform-minded ruler who had hired Confucian scholar Iwaida Sakuhi to advise him on ways to rectify and improve the domain’s governance, and the stone was one of Sakuhi’s suggestions. The path here at the time was lower than the street today, making the stone an even more imposing presence that loomed overhead as domain officials passed by.

The lines are excerpted from a longer poem on a similar stele erected by Meng Chang, last emperor of the Later Shu dynasty in tenth-century China. Meng’s example inspired the creation of numerous steles across China over the centuries to come, as Sakuhi would have known.

Records state that the stone served its intended purpose, inspiring the domain’s samurai to show greater diligence and respect for the people. However, a rumor eventually spread among the farmers of Nihonmatsu that the poem was to be read backwards as an exhortation to work people harder and take all they had. The harvest was poor in 1749, and the domain soon faced a full-blown peasant rebellion. Records state that Sakuhi went to speak with the rebels himself, explaining the true intent of the inscription so masterfully that many were brought to tears as they called an end to the rebellion.

The Nihonmatsu Shonentai

Southwest of Nihonmatsu Castle’s honmaru (main compound) stands a bronze relief depicting a group of young boys under the command of an older man preparing to battle an approaching enemy. This relief was created in 1968 by local sculptor Hashimoto Kosho as a memorial to the Shonentai, or “Boys’ Brigade,” many of whom died attempting to defend Nihonmatsu Castle when it came under attack in 1868 during the Boshin War.

The Boshin War was a civil war between an alliance led by powerful domains in western Japan and the Tokugawa shogunate. It began with the Battle of Toba-Fushimi in Kyoto, and the western alliance quickly swept east. As an ally of the shogunate, Nihonmatsu knew it would soon need to fight.

During the war, the shogunate began accepting military recruits as young as 15 to alleviate its troop shortage. However, Nihonmatsu domain had a longstanding custom of adding two years to the age of samurai recruits to their army. The continued application of this rule meant that, in practice, children as young as 13 signed up to defend Nihonmatsu. Due to the way ages were calculated in Japan at the time, some recruits had not yet reached their 12th birthday.

The newly formed brigade of boys between the ages of 13 and 17 was placed under the command of Kimura Jutaro, a 22-year-old expert in cannonry who had studied in Edo. The bronze relief stands on the site of the shooting range where he trained his young troops.

On the 29th day of the 7th month, 1868, the western alliance attacked Nihonmatsu. The invading army had 7,000 troops, with modern weapons and training. Nihonmatsu was defended by just 1,000 soldiers, including the 62 members of the Shonentai. Many of the boys were forced to fight without armor, and reports describe pairs of boys drawing each other’s swords, as the blades were too long for each to draw his own.

The battle was over before noon. Nihonmatsu Castle was torched, and 14 members of the Shonentai were killed, along with hundreds of other defenders. Their leader Kimura did not survive the battle.

This episode was so traumatic for Nihonmatsu as a community that the Shonentai were rarely discussed publicly for decades afterwards. This silence was finally broken in 1918 at an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the war, when a former Shonentai recruit named Mizuno Yoshiyuki distributed a self-published pamphlet about his experience. This encouraged other survivors and family members to come forward, providing testimony and documents that enabled historians to piece together the story after the fact. A multimedia exhibit in the Nihonmatsu Johokan information centerand history museum presents the results of this research.

In 1996, the scene depicted in Hashimoto Kosho’s relief was recreated in a group of bronze statues erected outside Minowa Gate. The statues were sculpted by Kosho’s son, Hashimoto Kentaro, and are notable for the addition of a mother retailoringan adult’s kimono for her son to wear into battle.

The Stone Walls of Nihonmatsu Castle

The long history of Nihonmatsu Castle makes it a treasure trove of stone wall technologies. The oldest surviving walls date to the 1590s and were built using the nozurazumi technique, in which natural, undressed stones of varying shapes and sizes are fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Later walls used dressed stone worked to fit more closely.

The Walls of the Honmaru

The stone walls of the honmaru (main compound) were originally built in the early seventeenth century. On the east side, only the lower halves of the original walls remained, buried in the earth until they were rediscovered in 1990. The western walls have been visible throughout the castle’s history, but were rebuilt using contemporary techniques sometime after the castle fell in 1868. As a result, a project was launched in 1993 to rebuild all of the honmaru stone walls using traditional techniques. The work was completed in 1995.

The Two-Level Wall

The oldest stone wall in the castle is just north of the honmaru, below the tenshudai (keep foundation). It has never fallen or been rebuilt, and remains exactly as it was in the sixteenth century.

The wall is around 7.5 meters high, divided into a distinct lower and upper half. It was built around 1590 using the nozurazumi technique employed for the walls of the massive Azuchi Castle near the shore of Lake Biwa a decade earlier, sparking a revolution in Japanese castle design.

The Great Wall

Another of the oldest and largest surviving stone walls stands just south of the honmaru. This wall is 13 meters high and 21 meters long at its base. It was built in the late sixteenth century as part of Gamo Ujisato’s project to modernize the castle, reinforcing its earthen construction with stone walls made using construction techniques not available to the original builders.

Minowa Gate

Minowa Gate was built by Niwa Mitsushige as part of his initial civil construction program after taking control of the castle in 1643. It was destroyed when the castle burned in 1868, but rebuilt in 1982. As the main gate of the castle, it was meant to impress.

OtemonGate

The former site of the castle’s Otemon Gate is outside Kasumigajo Park to the south. This gate stood between the castle and the Oshu Kaido highway, adding an extra degree of protection. It was long desired by the Niwa family, but the Tokugawa shogunate was reluctant to grant permission for more fortifications.

In the early nineteenth century, an ingenious advisor named Niwa Takaaki came up with a workaround. He first asked permission to build a wall instead of a gate, then requested leave to add a building on top of the wall. This ruse was successful, and Otemon Gate was completed in 1832. A section of the gate’s stone wall still stands today. It is an example of kikkozumi-kuzushi or “turtle shell” masonry, so called because rocks were dressed in roughly hexagonal shapes that fit together snugly in a turtle-shell pattern.

The Nihonmatsu Castle Honmaru

A Japanese castle’s honmaru is its main compound, surrounded by walls and designed to be defended against the fiercest attack. In most castles, the honmaru contained a towering keep called a tenshu as well as other buildings used for living quarters, domain administration, and storage. When a battle went against the castle’s defenders, the honmaru was where they gathered to mount their final defense. If the enemy breached the honmaru, the battle was lost.

The stone walls around the honmaru during the Niwa family’s tenure have been excavated and restored to give a sense of what the compound was like during its heyday. Because the honmaru occupied the high ground for greater defensibility, today its former site doubles as a lookout point with panoramic views of the city to the east and the Adatara massif to the west.

The Missing Keep

The northern corner of Nihonmatsu Castle’s honmaru contains a raised square area called the tenshudai, or “keep foundation.” Historians had long assumed that the keep that stood here had been destroyed when the castle burned in 1868, but careful archaeological work eventually revealed that a building was never constructed on the site.

Why Nihonmatsu Castle had a keep foundation but no keep is unclear, but the most likely explanation is political. By the time the lords of the castle had the funds to build a keep on top of the foundation, there was no plausible threat to defend against, and the Tokugawa shogunate saw no need to allow the domain to increase its military capabilities and enable a possible rebellion.

Defending the Gate

The only entrance to Nihonmatsu Castle’s honmaru was the southern gate, which has now been restored to its former state. As in most castles of the time, the gate opened onto an enclosure with a hard right turn and a second gate before the honmaru proper. This was designed to make the gate more defensible by preventing potential attackers from charging in, and the enclosure also made a useful staging ground when defenders were preparing to charge out.

The Senshintei Tea House

The Senshintei is a tea house in a tranquil corner of Nihonmatsu Castle’s grounds just west of Minowa Gate. It has three rooms for entertaining and serving tea, a small kitchen area for preparations, and toilet and bath facilities. It is the oldest extant building on the castle grounds, dating from the seventeenth century.

From Tranquil Retreat to Fishing Cabin

Today the Senshintei stands on raised ground on the western edge of the castle park. The shoji panels on the north and east side open to reveal a traditional Japanese garden below, with paths winding past trees, ponds, and flowers that offer a variety of blooms with the seasons. At the far end of the garden is the Senshin Waterfall, which is fed directly by the Nigoda Conduit that brings water to Nihonmatsu from the mountains 18 kilometers away.

The word senshin literally means “heart-cleansing,” and the Senshintei and its surroundings were evidently designed as a peaceful retreat inside Nihonmatsu Castle. It may originally have been known as the Sumie no O-chaya (ink-painting tea house), one of many tea houses known to have existed on the castle grounds. In 1837, the collapsed Senshintei was relocated to the banks of the nearby Abukuma River, where it was used as a fishing cabin by the daimyo. This is why the Senshintei survived even as the rest of the castle burned down in 1868 during the Boshin War.

The Senshintei and the Former Samurai

After the war, the aging cabin was completely renovated by former domain samurai Nakazawa Agata. When the domain system was abolished by the Meiji government, the structure passed into the hands of the Aioi Company, a financial association of former samurai and merchants.Finally, in 1907, it was moved back onto the castle’s old grounds by Yamada Osamu, another former samurai who was also entrusted with building the silk mill that operated on the grounds for a time. Yamada gave the Senshintei its current name, after the Senshin Waterfall nearby.

Today the Senshintei is used on occasion by local tea ceremony groups for tea preparation and other activities on weekends during events like the Chrysanthemum Festival and Sakura Festival.