Kishiwada Castle

Kishiwada Castle is said to have been built in 1334 by Wada Takaya, a member of Kusunoki Masanari’s family, in the town of Noda, east of the present castle.

The castle is also called Chikiri Castle (“chikiri” means a device used to sow the warp of a plane) because the shape of the castle, consisting of the main castle and the second castle in a row, resembles a chigiri (a “chikiri” is a device used to sow the warp of a plane).

In 1585, Hideyoshi Hashiba defeated Negoroji Temple in Kishu, and Hideyoshi’s uncle, Hidemasa Koide, became the lord of the castle and renovated the main citadel into a five-story castle tower.

Thereafter, Kishiwada Castle was held by three generations of the Koide clan, Matsudaira (Matsui) Yasushige and Yasuei from 1619, and the Okabe clan from 1640.

Okabe Nobukatsu further renovated the castle and built a modern castle fortification, and the Okabe family held the castle for 13 generations until the Meiji Restoration.

In 1827, the castle tower was destroyed by lightning, and during the Meiji Restoration, the lord of the castle himself destroyed the turrets, gates, and other castle facilities, leaving only the moat and stonewalls as structures from the pre-modern period.

The current castle tower is a three-story, three-story mock-up built in 1954, with an exhibition room and watchtower inside. There is also a garden called “Hachijin-no-niwa” (garden of eight camps) in the Honmaru.