25 castles by prefecture: the 12 original keeps, and what a concrete castle really is

Contents

1. There are three kinds of Japanese castle. Know this before you go
2. The 12 original keeps, Edo-period timber still standing
3. A century of change, from mountain castles to plains castles
4. How to read a stone wall: nozurazumi, uchikomi-hagi, kirikomi-hagi
5. Why almost every keep was lost
6. 25 major castles by prefecture
7. Admission, time needed, and linking castles into a route
8. Cherry blossom, autumn colour, seas of cloud, and illuminations
9. Visiting Kumamoto Castle, a recovery in progress
10. Frequently asked questions

There are three kinds of Japanese castle. Know this before you go

Travellers who came to Japan after seeing a photograph of Osaka Castle sometimes get a surprise when they step inside the keep. The interior is a concrete museum with a lift and a set route through the exhibits. People genuinely do come away thinking, I wanted to see inside a castle and got a museum instead.

That is not because Osaka Castle is a fake. The current keep was built in 1931 with money donated by the citizens of Osaka, in reinforced concrete, and at more than 90 years old it is itself a Registered Tangible Cultural Property. It is simply not the keep Toyotomi Hideyoshi built, nor the one the Tokugawa rebuilt. Knowing that before you go, or not knowing it, changes the quality of the visit.

Japanese castles fall into three broad groups.

• Original keeps: castles where the wooden keep built before the end of the Edo period still stands. There are only 12 in the whole country.
• Reconstructed keeps: keeps that were lost and later rebuilt. Most date from the 1950s and 1960s and are reinforced concrete. Osaka, Nagoya, Kumamoto, Hiroshima, and Okayama are all in this group. In recent years some have been rebuilt in timber instead, such as Kakegawa, Ozu, and the palace at Nagoya.
• Ruins: sites with no keep, where stone walls, moats, gates, and turrets remain. Edo Castle (the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace), the Takeda Castle ruins, the Azuchi Castle ruins. By sheer number this is the largest group.

Telling them apart from photographs is difficult, because exteriors are often reconstructed faithfully. Which is exactly why it is worth checking the category before you go.

The 12 original keeps, Edo-period timber still standing

The twelve are: Hirosaki (Aomori), Matsumoto (Nagano), Maruoka (Fukui), Inuyama (Aichi), Hikone (Shiga), Himeji (Hyogo), Matsue (Shimane), Bitchu Matsuyama (Okayama), Marugame (Kagawa), Matsuyama (Ehime), Uwajima (Ehime), and Kochi (Kochi).

The distribution is lopsided. Ten of the twelve are in central Japan or further west, and eastern Japan has only two, Hirosaki and Matsumoto. Four are clustered on Shikoku. Build an itinerary centred on Tokyo and Kyoto and you can easily end up encountering almost no original keeps at all.

Some things every original keep has in common. At the entrance you take your shoes off, put them in a plastic bag, and carry them up with you. The stairs are extremely steep; part of the climb at Matsumoto is around 60 degrees, and in places it feels less like using a handrail than hauling yourself up a rope. Ceilings are low, and tall visitors will hit their heads. There is no lift. In winter the floors are ice cold, so thick socks are a good idea.

It is not comfortable. But climbing while running your hand along 400-year-old posts and beams is not something you can get anywhere else. That, precisely, is the difference from a reconstruction.

The five National Treasure castles, and World Heritage

Five of the 12 original keeps are designated National Treasures: Himeji, Matsumoto, Inuyama, Hikone, and Matsue. Matsue was long only an Important Cultural Property, but the discovery of a prayer plaque recording the year of construction confirmed completion in 1611, and it was raised to National Treasure status in 2015. It was the first addition to the list of National Treasure keeps in more than 60 years.

The castle inscribed on the World Heritage list is Himeji, registered in 1993 as one of Japan’s first cultural World Heritage sites. Nijo Castle in Kyoto is also World Heritage, as part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, but it has no surviving keep; its highlight is the Ninomaru Palace, a National Treasure.

A century of change, from mountain castles to plains castles

Through the 15th and early 16th centuries, castles were almost all mountain castles. The purpose was purely defensive, and most were little more than earthworks and dry moats laid out across a steep hillside. The keep as a building did not yet exist. The Takeda Castle ruins in Hyogo, Bitchu Matsuyama in Okayama, and Gifu Castle belong to this lineage.

In the second half of the 16th century, as firearms spread and warfare shifted towards moving large armies, holing up on a mountaintop lost much of its point. At the same time, daimyo increasingly needed to control the economy of their domains, and you cannot run a castle town from a summit.

The turning point is Oda Nobunaga’s Azuchi Castle, begun in 1576. On a hill of not quite 200 m facing Lake Biwa, he built high stone walls, raised a five-storey tower, and laid out a castle town at the foot. It was a defensive work, a centre of politics and economics, and a device for making authority visible, all at once. Later castles follow that template.

By the Edo period, hilltop-and-plain and plains castles dominate. Osaka, Nagoya, Edo: all on flat ground or low rises, defended instead by enormous moats and high stone walls. The one castle per province edict of 1615 limited each daimyo to a single castle in principle, cutting the several thousand castles across the country down to about 170. This is where the pattern begins: castle sites everywhere in Japan, surviving keeps almost nowhere.

Nobody ever lived in the keep

Unlike the keep of a European castle, a Japanese tenshu was not a residence. A daimyo lived and governed in the single-storey palace buildings known as the honmaru goten or ninomaru goten. The keep was a storehouse, a watchtower, and above all a symbol of authority.

Which is why the inside of a keep is bare, with almost no decoration. Visitors sometimes ask where the lord’s room was. The answer is that it is not here.

If you want to see how a daimyo actually lived, go to a castle where a palace survives. The Ninomaru Palace at Nijo Castle in Kyoto (a National Treasure, famous for its nightingale floors), the Honmaru Palace at Nagoya Castle (fully rebuilt in timber in 2018, with the painted screens recreated), and the Honmaru Palace at Kochi Castle. Kochi is the only castle where both the keep and the honmaru palace survive, which makes it the best place of all to understand how the interior spaces worked.

There is direct evidence that keeps were not practical buildings. The keep of Edo Castle burned in the Great Meireki Fire of 1657, and the shogunate never rebuilt it, putting the money into rebuilding the city instead. The shogunate then continued for more than 200 years without one. Today, at the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace, only the enormous stone base of the keep remains. Admission is free.

How to read a stone wall: nozurazumi, uchikomi-hagi, kirikomi-hagi

What makes a castle site interesting even without a keep is the stonework. And the stone walls are frequently older than the keep ever was. There are three main techniques, and being able to tell them apart adds a lot to a visit.

• Nozurazumi: natural stones stacked with almost no shaping. It looks full of gaps, but it drains well and stands up to earthquakes. Common in castles up to the late 16th century. Inuyama, the Takeda Castle ruins, and the older sections of Kanazawa Castle.
• Uchikomi-hagi: the contact faces of each stone are dressed flat with a hammer and the gaps packed with small stones. It spread around the time of the Battle of Sekigahara and is the technique you see most often.
• Kirikomi-hagi: stones cut square and fitted with no gaps at all. It is the most beautiful and the most technically demanding. Used from the early Edo period onwards, in the most visible places at Edo, Osaka, and Nagoya.

The Tako-ishi stone inside the Sakura Gate at Osaka Castle has a face of roughly 60 square metres and an estimated weight of over 100 tonnes. It was carried by ship from the Seto Inland Sea. No defensive requirement called for a stone that size. It was there to display Tokugawa power. Stone walls were, quite literally, a display of authority.

The stonework at Marugame Castle rises in four tiers to a total height of about 60 m, said to be the highest in Japan. Part of it collapsed in the heavy rains of 2018 and restoration work continues (as of August 2026). The walls at Kumamoto Castle are known as fan-slope walls: gentle at the base and curving towards vertical as they rise. The design looks climbable and is not.

Why almost every keep was lost

This part is essential to understanding castles in Japan.

In 1873 the Meiji government issued the castle abolition edict. Castles were treated as relics of feudalism, and most were demolished or turned over to the army. Timber and roof tiles were sold off. Records show that even Himeji was put up for auction. That no buyer came forward, and that local people campaigned on its behalf, is what saved it.

Even so, 20 keeps still stood on the eve of the Second World War. Air raids in 1945 destroyed the keeps at Nagoya, Okayama, Hiroshima, Fukuyama, Wakayama, Ogaki, and Mito (its three-storey turret). Matsumae Castle in Hokkaido then lost its keep to fire in 1949, leaving the 12 that survive today. In the space of about five years, 40 percent of them were gone.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, many cities rebuilt their keeps: Nagoya in 1959, Kumamoto in 1960, Odawara in 1960, Hiroshima in 1958, Okayama in 1966. All in reinforced concrete. They were symbols of postwar recovery, and the material was chosen so that they would never burn again. That is why the interiors are concrete. Not corner-cutting, not tourism: a judgement of its time.

25 major castles by prefecture

Listed in prefectural code order, roughly north to south. In the category column, original keep means Edo-period timber, reconstruction means rebuilt, and ruins means a castle site with no keep.

Admission, time needed, and linking castles into a route

Admission and time guidance

All figures are as of August 2026. Prices are revised periodically, so check the official site before visiting. The times assume you are seeing the keep and the main buildings; add half a day for each castle if you also want to walk the castle town.

The keep is not the whole of a castle. In towns where the castle town survives, such as Hikone, Matsue, Takayama, and Kanazawa, it is worth giving half a day to a full day to walking the streets. If the townscapes themselves are what interest you, see our guide to Important Preservation Districts as well.

Building a castle route

Because 10 of the 12 original keeps are concentrated from central Japan westwards, they link up well by rail.

The classic run is Matsumoto to Inuyama to Hikone to Himeji. Matsumoto to Nagoya is about 2 hours by limited express, Nagoya to Inuyama about 30 minutes, Nagoya to Hikone about an hour by shinkansen and local line, and Hikone to Himeji about 1 hour 30 minutes by shinkansen. That covers four of the five National Treasure castles. Add Matsue and you have all five. For the central region see our Chubu and Japan Alps tours, and for Kansai our Kyoto and Kansai tours.

The four castles on Shikoku (Marugame, Matsuyama, Uwajima, Kochi) are also worth noting. If you want to combine Bitchu Matsuyama and Marugame, the Seto Inland Sea is your base; see our Setouchi tours. Distances add up on these routes, which makes them itineraries where a Japan Rail Pass or a regional pass starts to pay.

For help planning a castle-focused itinerary, use our contact page. If this is your first visit and you want to start from the big picture, see first trip to Japan.

Cherry blossom, autumn colour, seas of cloud, and illuminations

Cherry blossom

Castles and cherry blossom go together in a way that is special even by Japanese standards. Hirosaki Castle has around 2,600 trees, peaking in late April, which often coincides with Golden Week, so book accommodation early. It is one of the rare places that looks better once the petals start falling, when they carpet the moat in drifting rafts. Takato Castle Park in Ina, Nagano, has around 1,500 kohigan cherry trees, admission around ¥500, peaking early to mid-April. Osaka Castle has about 300 trees in the Nishinomaru Garden (admission around ¥200), where you can shoot them with the keep behind. The blossom at Himeji also works well against the white walls.

Autumn colour

Genkyuen at Hikone Castle peaks from mid to late November, with evening illuminations in some years. Okayama Castle with Korakuen, and the approach path up to Bitchu Matsuyama, are also known for autumn colour.

Seas of cloud

Bitchu Matsuyama and the Takeda Castle ruins produce seas of cloud at daybreak on clear, cold mornings between late September and early April. Because you have to be up at the viewpoint before dawn, staying the previous night is effectively mandatory. A day trip from a big city will almost never work. Whether it appears at all depends on that morning’s weather, and there is no way to guarantee it.

Illuminations

Osaka, Himeji, Matsumoto, and Kumamoto among others are lit at night, either year-round or seasonally. Nijo Castle stages projection mapping events in some years from autumn into winter. Note, however, that almost no castle lets you inside the keep at night. Treat the evening as something to view from outside.

Visiting Kumamoto Castle, a recovery in progress

In the Kumamoto earthquake of April 2016, about 30 percent of the castle’s stone walls collapsed or were destabilised, and several turrets came down. The keep, the 1960 reinforced concrete reconstruction, completed its repairs in 2021 and has reopened to visitors.

The target for completing the whole castle, however, is fiscal 2052. For the next quarter century, in other words, visitors will be seeing a castle under repair.

That is what the special viewing walkway was built for: an elevated route about 6 m high and 350 m long, from which you look down on stone walls still lying as they fell and on stones laid out one by one with numbers assigned to each. Because the walls have to go back exactly as they were, every fallen stone is recorded and the wall reassembled like a puzzle. We often hear that the work site left a stronger impression than a finished castle would have.

For itineraries in the region, see our Kyushu and Okinawa tours.

Frequently asked questions