Matsue Castle: The Tower's Wooden Records

In May 2012, two wooden prayer plaques were rediscovered at Matsue Shrine, close to the castle's surviving keep. They bore the year 1611. Researchers had been looking for them: the architectural historian Kido Hisashi had seen plaques in the tower in 1937, but their whereabouts later became unknown. Now the objects were available again, and the investigation could move from a written report to the wood itself.^[10]

The date was important. So was the question of where the plaques had belonged. A board found in a shrine near a castle could not establish its original position merely by being old. Architectural historian Nishi Kazuo called for the nail holes to be matched with a post inside the keep. The building might still contain the other half of the evidence.^[9]

Matsue preserves several such relationships between writing and material. Carpenters marked pieces destined for its frame. Salt labels carried the names of coastal suppliers into a basement store. Other boards recorded a quantity already being kept there. These inscriptions had different users and purposes, but each attached information to something physical. Following them reveals how the tower was assembled, supplied and understood by people whose work is less conspicuous than its roofs.

The castle belonged to a new regional center. After the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the Horio family received Izumo and Oki and initially established themselves at Gassan Toda Castle. Their subsequent move to Matsue brought the seat of government to Kameda Hill, within a lowland setting. Construction began in 1607; the keep was substantially complete in 1611.^[2][3]

The project crossed generations. Horio Tadauji died in 1604, leaving his young son Tadaharu; Tadauji's father Yoshiharu remained involved in establishing the new center. The building usually attached to a founder's name emerged from the work of a ruling household whose membership had already changed before construction began.^[2]

Waterways connected the new seat to its surroundings. Matsue lay within the landscape of Lake Shinji and Nakaumi, and the castle moats became part of the network through which people and goods moved. An official historical profile records transport along these channels over the generations following the castle's foundation. Their water also served domestic purposes, though not drinking.^[4]

That setting gives the labels inside the keep a geographical frame. Coastal communities supplied a government located inland from their production sites. The surviving inscriptions can identify places of origin even where they do not preserve the intervening journey. They allow us to begin with a room inside the fortress and follow its connections outward.

The place receiving these things was larger than the keep alone. Palaces, stores, kitchens and service offices occupied the surrounding enclosures. The tall structure was embedded in an administrative complex, not left to operate as an independent household. Its most conspicuous occupants today may be visitors looking out over the town; its wooden records direct attention to materials and information moving inward.^[8]

The keep has five principal interior floors above a basement, despite the four main tiers presented by its exterior roof arrangement. Within the frame, substantial posts pass through two levels. Their placement connects adjacent floors without requiring one immense central post to run through the entire tower.^[3]

Making such a frame requires each member to reach an assigned position. A prepared timber is not useful simply because it is large enough. Its joints have to meet those of other pieces. At Matsue, carved and inked assembly marks preserve the practical work of identifying components before or during their incorporation into the structure.^[5]

A study by Nishi Kazuo, Yamada Yukari, Nakajima Ayano and Kawamura Mari reexamined the 1950–1955 restoration documents. The researchers identified ninety-six posts extending through two levels and differences between the lower and upper portions of the keep. Carved marks predominate below; inked marks occur especially above. Timbers and workmanship differ too.^[7]

The marks act rather like addresses. They belong to a system for bringing pieces into the correct relationships, not to a public account of the lord's achievements. Once the building is assembled, they may become inconspicuous. Their task has been accomplished when the right timber stands in the right place.

Post coverings add another layer. Many structural members are wrapped with boards; the research distinguishes the covering from the load-bearing timber beneath it. A proposal to remove coverings during the mid-twentieth-century restoration was not carried through. The distinction is easy to lose when a boarded post is casually called a “composite pillar,” as though its visible surface necessarily explains how it bears weight.^[7]

The keep therefore contains evidence on different surfaces, some exposed and some concealed. Differences between lower and upper work do not, by themselves, establish that the top was added in a separate later rebuilding. They identify a construction question that can be tested against restoration records and other parts of the frame. The marks first helped builders manage an assembly; they now help researchers recover how that assembly varied.

The salt labels, discovered in the basement during the 1950–1955 dismantling repair, record a different movement into the castle. Forty survive. Matsue History Museum describes thirty-six with writing on both sides: district, village and local officials on one face; weight and the producer's name on the other. Six coastal village names occur, all in Shimane District.^[1]

A label attached to a bale joined quantity to responsibility. The weight identified an amount of salt. The names connected it to a producer and to the officials of a particular community. Once the bale had left its place of origin, the information traveled with it. A storekeeper did not have to treat every delivery as anonymous material.

The museum identifies this salt payment as komononari, a category of miscellaneous levies distinct from ordinary land tax. That classification places the deliveries within obligations owed to the domain government. The castle was receiving part of what coastal communities supplied, rather than merely accumulating purchases made in a market.^[1]

The published transcription table gives these general descriptions individual form. Its first entry records a label from Sugaura, with a headman and elder on one side and a weight of nine kan and another personal name on the reverse. Kan is the weight unit written on the label. The next entries vary in quantity, names and the survival of their text.^[12]

Those variations prevent the group from becoming a symbolic collection of identical “tax tags.” A particular label belonged to a particular consignment. Names could distinguish people holding the same kinds of office; a weight could distinguish one delivery from another. Inscriptions that look repetitive in a catalogue were useful precisely because a shared format carried changing information.

The dates of every delivery are not recoverable, and the labels do not give each bale's route. The moats and regional waterways establish a connected setting, not a reconstructed journey for the Sugaura consignment. What the surviving group does establish is that a room inside the tower received supplies with a documented origin. Its contents had a history before they reached the basement.

Four labels at the end of the transcription table differ from the village entries. Their inscriptions record twenty-five bales of salt and a date; the reverses are listed as blank. They are broader and thicker than many of the consignment tags. The catalogue notes surviving nails on two of them.^[12]

This is a change in what needed to be stated. A consignment label could identify a producer, community and weight. A board naming twenty-five bales with a date describes a quantity in another form. The writing groups material together rather than distinguishing the origin of every individual delivery.

Matsue Castle researcher Urabe Yoshihiro proposed that the two formats belonged to successive stages of handling. One type probably accompanied deliveries from producing communities. The other may have served the management of salt within the keep. The city’s account of his 2018 report says that the dated group suggests at least twenty-five bales may have been renewed at two-year intervals.^[6]

It remains a proposed reading, not a complete stock ledger. The small surviving series cannot establish an uninterrupted routine throughout two and a half centuries of domain government. Its particular value is the distinction it makes possible between bringing salt into the castle and administering it after arrival.

For delivery, the relevant question might be whose salt this was and how much had been sent. For a reserve, the relevant information could become how many bales belonged to a particular dated group. That is the administrative transition suggested by the contrasting inscriptions. The same substance could acquire a different description as it passed from a community's obligation into a castle's stock.

The reserve also had a specific location. Matsue's basement was known as the salt store; a well lay within the same protected lower part of the keep. The official description records the shaft's former depth as about twenty-four meters. Water and stored provisions were thus brought within the defensive boundary rather than left entirely dependent on movement outside it.^[5]

The labels contribute something more exact than the familiar observation that defenders needed food. They indicate that supplies were identified, counted and perhaps periodically replaced. A reserve could remain a reserve while the material composing it changed. The dated boards are a possible record of that continuity through replacement, written at the scale of a particular store rather than of the whole castle.

The basement was not the domain's only store. The castle's recorded arrangement places rice granaries in the lower enclosure east of the keep. South of those granaries were the residence of the official entrusted with the keep's keys and offices concerned with repairs, including temple and shrine repairs.^[8]

These named functions connect the inscriptions to an organization outside the tower's walls. Someone had custody of access. Other offices dealt with the building fabric. Supplies occupied different places. The records do not make the tower into a self-contained command room responsible for every task performed around it.

Urabe's salt investigation offers a small warning against treating its contents as representative of all domain procurement. His report notes that Koura, a locality associated with salt for official use in the domain's documentary record, does not appear among the surviving keep labels. All the named production places on those labels lie in Shimane District instead.^[6]

An absence from this small group does not prove Koura never supplied the castle. It does show why the store's surviving record and the domain's wider salt supply cannot simply be substituted for each other. They are different sets of information. One concerns the labels recovered in a particular room; the other concerns production and use across a larger territory.

The same principle helps explain the building. Its most visible part need not have contained every activity of government. Top-floor fittings suggest a more finished space than the basement store, while the surrounding palaces and offices accommodated other functions.^[5][8] The salt labels, assembly marks and named offices each bring a different part of this arrangement into focus. Their value lies in their specificity: they attach work to a member of the frame, a consignment, a reserve or a place of responsibility.

The two plaques rediscovered in 2012 were more than administrative labels. One records a ritual recitation of the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sutra and a prayer for lasting military fortune. It names Daisen-ji, a Buddhist temple, and carries a date in the first lunar month of 1611. The museum's explanation identifies the pair with wishes for the completed keep's continuing prosperity.^[10]

The object consequently connects the building to religious activity. Its writing sought something from the future. A salt label identified goods already being delivered or kept; a carpenter's mark assigned a component its place. The prayer expressed hopes for what would follow construction. The scriptural observance was part of the protection sought for a fortress, not an alternative architectural plan.

The plaques' date was recorded long before their modern rediscovery. A cultural-property catalogue cites a pasted note in a castle document whose copy is dated 1766. The note refers to dated prayer plaques in the tower and salt store. In 1937, Kido saw plaques on the fourth floor. Their locations and recording history were therefore part of the investigation, rather than a simple story of objects untouched on the same posts since 1611.^[11][9]

The surviving boards also differ from one another. The catalogue describes cedar split boards of unequal height, with differences in symmetry, surface finishing and damage. Their inscriptions can be read as texts, but their material features help identify them as particular objects.^[11] That identity made it possible to take the next step: to look for the marks they had left on the building.

Nishi's request for a nail-hole match was therefore practical, not ceremonial. The date on the plaque needed a relationship with the surviving frame. In November 2012, investigators identified attachment positions on two large basement posts. In June 2013, pale traces in the shapes of the plaques supplied further confirmation. Urabe's account records both stages. Written date, attachment points and surface outlines could now be considered together.^[9]

This convergence strengthened the case for completion in 1611 and contributed to the keep's National Treasure designation in 2015.^[3] A small object had become useful for dating a large one because its physical relationship with that larger object had been recovered.

Matsue's keep had survived the disposal of castle structures in 1875 through local preservation efforts. Its later dismantling repair exposed material that ordinary use had concealed. The prayer plaques followed another path, becoming separated from their earlier locations and then being identified again. The survival of the tower and the survival of its records were related but uneven processes.^[2]

Together, the records describe several different moments. The 1611 plaques belong to the building's foundation and the protection sought for it. Assembly marks preserve information used in fitting its frame together. The salt tags concern later deliveries and storage; they are not automatically evidence of the keep's opening inventory. The differences in date and purpose give the building a working history rather than a single frozen instant.

A name on a salt tag once helped make a delivery attributable. A number within a carpenter's marking system helped a timber reach its position. A dated prayer associated a new stronghold with an act of religious observance. None was created simply to explain the castle to future visitors. The explanatory value came later, when the original tasks had ended and the writing remained.

The regained 1611 date is the best-known result. The labels from the basement offer another kind of recovery, returning coastal communities and the handling of their salt to the history of a tower that can appear self-sufficient. Matsue's smaller wooden pieces connect its monumental form to particular acts of building, supplying, counting and praying. What they preserve is not one complete account, but several precise ways in which people made the castle part of their work.