Tsuruga Castle: A Fortress Rebuilt for Visitors

In 1917, the forestry professor Honda Seiroku proposed making the top of a castle wall into a promenade. Steps and protective fencing would help people use a structure originally intended to obstruct their approach. His scheme for Wakamatsu Park combined historical remains with recreation. Rebuilding the vanished keep was not its organizing purpose.^[1]

The plan belongs to Tsuruga Castle, also called Wakamatsu Castle, in the Aizu basin of northeastern Japan. The tower familiar today would not rise until 1965. Between the destruction of the old buildings and the creation of the new ones, the ground had to acquire purposes other than defending and governing a domain.

That interval is easily lost when the story moves straight from the siege of 1868 to a photograph of the restored skyline. Yet the park, the museum inside the keep, and the wooden structures beside it are different answers to the same practical question: what should people be able to do here once the castle's former government has gone? Following those answers brings the modern building into the history, rather than leaving it outside as a substitute for something older.

The stronghold developed through successive building campaigns. Gamō Ujisato enlarged the castle in the 1590s, when the surrounding town acquired the name Wakamatsu. In 1639, Katō Akinari's works gave the keep its five-tiered form and extended the defenses to the north and west. The building later remembered through the siege was already the product of alteration, rather than the first tower erected on the site.^[2]

Its setting was a productive basin connected by routes through the surrounding mountains. The castle occupied a position near the southeastern side of the town, not an isolated summit detached from settlement. It belonged to the administration of a territory as well as to the possibility of a battle. The lords needed access to people and resources that could not all be kept within the walls.^[3]

Hoshina Masayuki entered Aizu in 1643. His descendants, later bearing the Matsudaira name, governed from the castle through the remainder of the Tokugawa period. A domain was a territorial government under a lord, with its own retainers and administration, within the larger order headed by the shogun. The final Aizu lord associated with the siege, Matsudaira Katamori, had also served the shogunate in Kyoto.^[4]

The visible keep was only one part of this establishment. The inner compound contained the palace, while gates, connecting galleries, and corner turrets organized its edge. The Hoshii turret took its name from dried cooked rice kept as provisions; the adjoining South Gallery served storage and defense. Food, weapons, circulation, and protection occupied neighboring spaces.^[5]

This arrangement matters to what was eventually rebuilt. Restoring a tower could give the town a recognizable landmark without restoring the relationships among all those buildings. A stronghold in use needed supplies to remain available and people to move between positions. A skyline, however accurate its outline, could not show the whole arrangement. The lower buildings would eventually become central to explaining how the castle had worked.

In 1868, the conflict between the new imperial government and forces associated with the former shogunate reached Aizu. Tsuruga Castle endured roughly a month of siege before surrender. Its occupants lost the stronghold, but the keep did not collapse or disappear at that moment. The surviving buildings were dismantled in 1874.^[2][4]

That separation between military defeat and physical removal left time for photography. One pre-demolition view shows the tower rising behind a long, low defensive building. Its walls are damaged, but the rooflines still form an intelligible structure. In the foreground, the gallery and its stone base take up much of the picture. The image preserves a castle with connections, not only an isolated tower.^[6]

The photograph also preserves a condition that the present building does not attempt to reproduce. Damage belonged to the castle's life after the siege. A reconstruction of its earlier architectural appearance would necessarily look different from a reconstruction of that damaged state. Before making a new building, someone would have to choose what point in its history the new work was meant to represent.

After demolition, preservation initially concerned the land rather than a replacement keep. A later account maintained by Jūkoku-ji, the temple where the former Aizu retainer and banker Endō Keishi is buried, records his purchase of the castle ground in 1890 and its presentation to the Matsudaira family. The property subsequently passed into municipal ownership.^[7]

Acquiring the ground and rebuilding on it were separate undertakings. The first could keep a recognizable site together without supplying the money, design, or agreement needed for the second. A wall and an empty platform could remain available for future purposes while nobody yet knew which buildings would return. Tsuruga's public history began with that more modest form of continuity: the location survived the removal of the institution and much of its architecture.

Honda's 1917 park proposal approached the surviving ground as both a historical place and a setting for ordinary recreation. Architectural historian Wangwoo Suh describes a scheme that included gardens, planting, recreational grounds, and adaptations to the ramparts. Honda did not propose rebuilding every lost gate and turret. His attention extended to steps, routes, and safety at the edges of the old defenses.^[1]

A defensive wall and a promenade make different demands on their users. The first gains part of its value from making passage difficult. The second must let someone walk along it without turning the height into an uncontrolled hazard. Adding a stair or a fence changes the encounter with the stonework even when the stonework itself remains. Public access therefore had a design history; it was not what automatically happened when the soldiers left.

There was a tension within the proposal too. Honda sought to retain important historical features, but he was prepared to alter other parts of the ground for the park's purposes. His scheme is evidence of a choice being worked out, not proof that every proposed garden or recreational facility was built. It shows a period in which conserving a castle site did not necessarily mean returning it to one complete military appearance.^[1]

The distinction helps explain the space around the keep today. An open area can be convenient for a gathering, a view, or a walk precisely because the rooms that once divided it no longer stand. Rebuilding every partition would recover one sort of information while changing the public space that had developed in its absence. Preservation could consequently require decisions about what to leave open as well as what to put back.

National historic-site designation followed in 1934.^[8] The ground was becoming an object of protection in its own right, before it regained a tower. Its value no longer depended solely on what a lord could do from it. The surviving walls, moats, and building sites provided a framework within which a different public use could be organized.

The return of the keep was not simply the execution of a plan everyone had always shared. The Broadcast Library's catalogue account of a 2002 Fukushima Central Television documentary records opposition in the city council over the cost, alongside fundraising associated with the mayor. This was a proposal competing for resources, even among people living in the town that would acquire the rebuilt landmark.^[9]

The present tower was completed in September 1965. Its construction used concrete, and its interior became a local-history museum. The city later explicitly distinguished this building from the timber reconstruction undertaken beside it.^[8][10]

Inside the museum, the former governing household became a subject of display. The keep's outline helped identify that subject before a visitor crossed the threshold; the objects and explanations supplied a history that the outline alone could not give. The interior's new work was interpretation, rather than service to the domain.

The result joined two different forms of recovery. From outside, the tower restored a vertical focus to the castle site. Inside, it offered a place in which the past could be arranged for inspection. Its floors did not return to their old work simply because the roofline resembled the vanished building. The reconstruction created an institution for visitors, using the castle's recognizable form as its address.

Nor did that project complete the site. The present castle precinct includes surviving ground, repaired masonry, returned structures, and later reconstructions. The Rinkaku tea room, for example, had been protected away from the castle and was brought back in 1990. Its return was a transfer of a preserved building, a different operation from making the concrete keep.^[11]

By the late twentieth century, the question was becoming more specific than whether the city should have a castle again. Which parts of the former arrangement could be recovered, by what means, and what would they help a reader of the place understand?

The next major reconstruction concentrated on Hoshii and the South Gallery. These buildings connected the keep's vicinity to the defended edge of the inner compound. Their importance lay in a working relationship rather than in rivaling the tower's height.

Excavation in 1996 supplied information that distant photographs could not. Recesses cut into stones indicated where timber had rested. Foundation positions suggested a corridor beside small rooms in the gallery; arrowheads found in the rooms were consistent with documentary references to weapon storage.^[12]

The finds changed the questions a new building could answer. A photograph might establish where an exterior wall stood. A foundation could help place the line of posts behind it. Together, those lines began to separate movement from storage: a route along which people could pass and rooms in which materials could be kept. The gallery became understandable as an arrangement of activities, not merely a picturesque stretch of white wall.

An arrowhead on its own would not identify an entire room's use. Its value increased because its location could be considered alongside the foundations and the written identification. The sources supplied different pieces of the same problem. The excavation located the find; the plan explained the room; the record offered a use against which the material could be checked.

This sort of information matters particularly at Tsuruga, where the famous tower can make the surrounding buildings seem incidental. Provisions and weapons were useful because they could be kept within reach of the people expected to use them. Connecting galleries helped organize that reach. Reconstructing one corner of the compound could therefore explain something that a much taller building had left difficult to imagine.

There was also a new practical obligation. The restored structures would contain visitors, while their foundations occupied protected archaeological ground. The builders placed the new supporting arrangement above protected remains, accommodating present safety requirements without simply loading the new work onto every historic trace.^[13]

The resulting building has two different relationships with what lies below it. The archaeology helped determine its form; conservation requirements helped determine how it would stand. Rebuilding and preservation could cooperate only after those jobs had been separated.

Research for the reconstruction also changed the history of a photograph. For years, pre-demolition views of the castle had been associated with the photographer Koyama Yasaburō and an 1872 journey through the region. During the project, another view surfaced in Japan. Comparing the two revealed a difference in the surviving plaster on a projecting part of the keep. The city's published account concluded that they represented different dates, and reconsidered which photograph could be assigned to Koyama.^[14]

The comparison is visible in the paired images reproduced with that account. One shows more of the white facing intact; in the other, more of the material beneath it is exposed. The photographs do not merely offer alternative attractive angles. They record a building undergoing deterioration between separate moments of observation.^[14]

This posed a useful difficulty for the reconstruction. A picture can provide very precise information about a roof or wall while still raising questions about when that information was recorded. The builders needed to recover a particular architectural state, not reproduce every difference among the available images. Clearer photographs helped them choose the late-Edo form as the reference for Hoshii and the gallery.^[15]

The work was therefore not a simple enlargement of an old picture. A photograph had to be placed in a sequence; its visible details had to be joined to a footprint; the footprint had to support a buildable arrangement. At each stage the question grew more concrete. What looked like a single lost building became a set of decisions about dimensions, materials, and the point in time to be represented.

Those decisions also produced new records. When damaged stones were replaced during the associated repairs, the replacements were marked on their backs with the year of the work. The marks would not improve the finished view. Their purpose was to keep the new material identifiable within a wall intended to look continuous.^[13]

A person encountering the castle through its reconstruction could thus be seeing the result of research that also revised what was known about the original. The project did not end with a picture made solid. It left a more detailed account of how the picture, the ground, and the new construction were related.

Hoshii and the South Gallery were completed in December 2000 and opened to the public in April 2001. In explaining their intended use, the city made a distinction: the keep housed historical displays, while the timber buildings could themselves demonstrate construction and defensive arrangements. The surrounding museum and the reconstructed architecture were meant to explain different aspects of the same place.^[8][10]

That division remains useful even as exhibitions change. A museum can bring together objects from different locations and periods. A reconstructed room asks how a particular space was organized. One can explain a lord's career or an episode in the war; the other can show how a passage relates to a store or how an enclosed edge overlooks the moat. Neither needs to do all the other's work.

The keep acquired another visible change in 2011, when its roof was covered with red tiles intended to recover its late-shogunate appearance. Local interpretation connects the older use of glazed red tiles with the demands of Aizu's cold climate. The new roof brought the twentieth-century building closer to one aspect of the earlier exterior without turning its concrete structure into a surviving Edo-period keep.^[16]

The castle now brings several kinds of public use into proximity. Walking through the grounds, entering a museum, and studying a reconstructed timber space are different activities. Their coexistence was made possible by choices extending from land preservation and park design to excavation and building work.

Honda's proposed promenade belongs within that history as much as the returned roofline. Both addressed a place from which the old governing household had departed. The city did not restore the domain by restoring parts of its fortress. It created ways for later people to use the ground and investigate the institution that had once occupied it. Tsuruga's reconstruction is most revealing at that point: where a building made to sustain a government became a place in which the government, the battle, and the buildings themselves could be understood.