Takada Castle

Takada Castle was built in Keichō 19 (1614) as the castle of Matsudaira Tadateru, the sixth son of Tokugawa Ieyasu, in the remarkably short period of just four months. What made this rapid completion possible was the large-scale labor-contribution system imposed on daimyo across the country, known as “tenka bushin” (nationwide construction), and daimyo and craftsmen gathered from various regions threw their full strength into the construction.

The greatest feature of Takada Castle is that it is a “castle without a tenshū” (main keep). Shortly after the completion of the construction, the Osaka campaigns and the dismissal of Tadateru followed in succession, so the building work on the turrets and other structures barely progressed. The turrets that served as substitutes for the tenshū were double-storied during the early Edo period; after the restoration following the Takada earthquake of Kanbun 5 (1666), they are believed to have become three-story triple turrets (the current triple turret was reconstructed in Heisei 5 (1993)).

The castle layout (nawabari) is a flat castle of the rinkaku (enclosure) type, surrounded by an inner moat, an outer moat, and water moats overgrown with lotus. The lotus beds in the moats of the present Takada Castle Ruins Park are abundant, and the lotus blooming in the outer moat in summer is celebrated as “the finest in the East,” making it a famous attraction alongside the spring night cherry blossoms. The spring night cherry blossoms in particular (about 4,000 Somei-yoshino trees) are nationally renowned as one of Japan's Three Great Night Cherry Blossom Sites.

Although Matsudaira Tadateru was the sixth son of Ieyasu, he was censured for his conduct during the Osaka campaigns, among other things, and was dismissed from his domain in Genna 2 (1616). The castle thereafter passed through the hands of the Sakai, Matsudaira, and Sakakibara clans, among others, and functioned as the main castle of the Takada Domain until the late Edo period.