Kōriyama Castle

Kōriyama Castle was a Sengoku-period castle residence in Kōriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, also known as Inaridate. It was the seat of the Kōriyama clan (a branch of the Itō clan), which was affiliated with the Date clan.

The year of construction is not clear. In Tenshō 16 (1588), when a coalition army led by Satake Yoshishige as supreme commander, including the Ashina, Nikaidō, Ishikawa and Iwaki forces, surrounded Kōriyama Castle, Date Masamune personally went out to relieve it, and the two armies faced each other across the Ōse River (Battle of Kōriyama). The castle lord, Itō Tarōzaemon, endured the pressure of the coalition, held the isolated castle to the end, and did not surrender.

In the Edo period the castle residence was lost, and on its site the Nihonmatsu Domain established a daikansho (magistrate's office) to govern the Kōriyama, Ōtsuki and Katahira units (kumi) of Asaka District.

The site of the castle was long thought to be the plateau called 'Nishinouchi.' However, through documentary research and the 2022 excavation of the Inaridate site, a moat separating the main enclosure (honmaru) from the secondary enclosure (fukumaru) was confirmed, and the area around the Inaridate site in front of Kōriyama Station was fixed as the castle site. Since the modern era, Kōriyama has developed rapidly as an agricultural and industrial city through the Meiji government's Asaka land reclamation and Asaka Canal projects, and it now flourishes as a core city in central Fukushima Prefecture. The castle site is now urban area, and no remains survive above ground.