Qualla: Kakegawa Castle

Kakegawa Castle: Introduction

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit by Monado, CC BY-SA 3.0. The bill came to one billion yen, and the citizens of Kakegawa paid it themselves. In April 1994, a wooden keep rose again on the hilltop at the center of their city -- the first castle tower reconstructed using traditional methods in postwar Japan. No steel frames hiding inside plastered walls, no concrete poured behind a historical facade. Kakegawa Castle's tenshukaku was built the way Yamauchi Kazutoyo's builders would have recognized four centuries earlier, assembled from timber using surviving diagrams of the original structure. The result stands today above the old Tokaido highway as both a monument to feudal engineering and a statement of civic pride.

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Image: by Monado | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kakegawa Castle: Crossroads of Power

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit inunami, CC BY 2.0. Kakegawa's strategic importance was written into the landscape long before any castle stood here. The city controlled a vital stretch of the Tokaido, the great highway connecting Kyoto with eastern Japan, and had served as an important post station since the Heian period. Whoever...

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Image: inunami | CC BY 2.0

Kakegawa Castle: The Builder and His Legacy

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ShizuokaSensei at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The castle that visitors see today owes its form to Yamauchi Kazutoyo, a retainer of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. After the Battle of Odawara in 1590, Hideyoshi forced Tokugawa Ieyasu to trade his Tokai domains for the Kanto region. Kakegawa passed to Yamauchi as the center of a 51,000 ko...

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Image: ShizuokaSensei at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kakegawa Castle: Earthquakes and Endurance

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexrk2, CC BY-SA 3.0. If any theme runs through Kakegawa Castle's story, it is resilience against seismic violence. The 1604 earthquake toppled the original keep. Two and a half centuries later, the devastating Ansei Tokai earthquake of 1854 inflicted extensive damage across the entire complex. Most s...

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Image: Alexrk2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kakegawa Castle: Rebuilt by Hand

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 国立国会図書館, Public domain. The 1994 reconstruction was an act of deliberate authenticity. Engineers worked from a handful of surviving diagrams to recreate the tenshukaku in wood, using the same joinery techniques that castle builders had employed in the Edo period. Along with the keep, sections of the inn...

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Image: 国立国会図書館 | Public domain