Qualla: Kururi Castle

Kururi Castle: Introduction

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abasaa, Public domain. Legend says it rained twenty-one times during the construction of Kururi Castle -- once every three days on average -- earning it the nickname Rain Castle. Whether the weather was really that persistent or the builders simply needed a good excuse for delays, the name stuck across five centuries. Perched on a 227-meter hill in Kimitsu, on the green spine of the Boso Peninsula in southern Chiba Prefecture, this small mountain fortress spent its entire existence caught between larger powers: seized, lost, rebuilt, abandoned, destroyed by government order, and finally reconstructed in concrete for tourists. It is a castle that never stopped being fought over, even by time itself.

Read more: Kururi Castle on Qualla

Image: Abasaa | Public domain

Kururi Castle: A Mountaintop in the Warring States

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Σ64, CC BY 3.0. The original Kururi Castle was built during the Muromachi period by Takeda Nobunaga (1401-1477) -- not the famous Oda Nobunaga of unification fame, but a local warlord of the same given name whose descendants, the Mariyatsu branch of the Takeda clan, held the hilltop from 1540. W...

Read more: Kururi Castle on Qualla

Image: Σ64 | CC BY 3.0

Kururi Castle: The Tokugawa Settlement

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ja:user:Mocchy, Public domain. The game of musical chairs ended after the Siege of Odawara in 1590, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi crushed the Hojo and punished the Satomi by stripping them of their territories in Kazusa Province. When Tokugawa Ieyasu moved into the Kanto region, he assigned Kururi to his retainer Ma...

Read more: Kururi Castle on Qualla

Image: ja:user:Mocchy | Public domain

Kururi Castle: Revival and Ruin

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexrk2, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1742, Kururi Domain was reinstated when Kuroda Naozumi transferred in from Numata Domain. He rebuilt the old fortifications, and his descendants -- a branch of the Kuroda clan -- governed Kururi through the final century of the Edo period and into the turbulence of the Meiji R...

Read more: Kururi Castle on Qualla

Image: Alexrk2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kururi Castle: A Castle Rebuilt for Memory

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 京浜にけ at Japanese Wikipedia This photo was taken with Canon PowerShot G9, CC BY-SA 3.0. The hilltop became a public park in 1955, and in 1979 the city of Kimitsu reconstructed the donjon as a local history museum. The modern tower is honest about its compromises: the original Edo-period donjon was a two-story, two-roofed structure, but the reconstruction has three i...

Read more: Kururi Castle on Qualla

Image: 京浜にけ at Japanese Wikipedia This photo was taken with Canon PowerShot G9 | CC BY-SA 3.0