Japan Up Close Essay Series

While I enjoyed visiting castles as a tourist, my interest in them as a researcher really began in 2013 with a chance meeting with Ran Zwigenberg, a fellow historian who had also recently finished his PhD, and is now a professor at Pennsylvania State University. In that initial conversation, we came upon the question of why there were so many concrete castles in Japan. While conducting his award-winning research on Hiroshima and memory, Professor Zwigenberg had come across heated debates in Hiroshima in the 1950s regarding the reconstruction of the Hiroshima Castle keep, which had been destroyed by the atomic bomb in 1945.

Together, we decided to pursue this topic further, and realized that the local conflict over the castle in Hiroshima was repeated throughout the country, from large cities like Nagoya to small towns like Aizu-Wakamatsu. A popular narrative holds that many of Japan’s tenshu were destroyed by bombing in 1945, but in fact only eight keeps were lost during the war years. The vast majority of castle structures had been destroyed immediately after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 as part of the wholesale modernization processes that shook the country.

Many castle sites were repurposed as military garrisons for the new Imperial Army, and premodern structures were torn down to make room for barracks, arsenals, and parade grounds. By the time a concerted effort at heritage preservation began to emerge in Japan in the 1880s – simultaneously with developments in many other countries in Europe and elsewhere – countless structures had already been lost.

After 1945, the major urban castle sites were demilitarized and turned into parks, universities, heritage sites, and other public spaces. As part of this shift, the 1950s and 1960s saw an unprecedented castle-building boom, as dozens of concrete tenshu were built across Japan to recapture local pride, symbolize postwar recovery, and draw tourists from home and abroad. Now, almost 70 years on, these structures may seem odd, as they did to a younger me. They should not be dismissed simply as “inauthentic” versions of premodern wooden tenshu, however, but rather as valuable sites for understanding Japan’s complex modern history, and how that has been remembered, contested, and recast over the past 150 years. This contestation continues today in sites such as Nagoya, where the 1950s concrete tenshu has been condemned and grand and controversial plans have been made to reconstruct it from wood in an “authentic” manner.

Although they seemed unusual to me at first, Japan’s concrete castle keeps are the product of much larger global debates on history and heritage that were not unique to Japan. On the contrary, the destruction of premodern castles in the nineteenth century echoed developments in the UK and across Europe, as older structures were demolished with little remorse to make way for railways, roads, and industry. Ideas around the value of heritage and its preservation took place simultaneously in Japan and Britain around the turn of the twentieth century. The two countries were firm allies and had many cultural and intellectual exchanges, and were especially keen to celebrate one another’s medieval pasts, drawing comparisons between idealized knights and samurai.

Similarly, the large-scale loss of castles and other architectural heritage in the Second World War affected much of Europe, as well. Many countries saw heated debates about whether or not to reconstruct lost buildings, and if so, whether to use concrete or traditional materials. As in Japan, Britain and the rest of Europe should consider these sites and structures as witnesses of their turbulent modern history, rather than as unmediated evidence of the premodern past.