Wakayama Castle's Stone Walls: Three Lords, Three Kinds of Masonry

Overview

Most visitors photograph the white keep and walk straight past the better story. Wakayama Castle changed hands three times in its first forty years, and each set of lords built in a different stone by a different method — all of it still standing side by side on one hill. Under Toyotomi Hidenaga and the Kuwayama (1585-1600) the walls are crystalline schist, the blue-green aoishi of the local hills, stacked much as it was quarried. Under Asano Yoshinaga (1600-1619) they are Izumi sandstone, faces and corners knocked flat so the blocks bed tightly. From 1619 the Tokugawa added granite porphyry from Kumano, cut so exactly that the joints close altogether.

The base of the keep is thought to be among the oldest masonry on the hill, and among its rough schist are stones recycled from old pagodas and Buddhist figures. Below the Shin-Urazaka slope, an Asano-era wall carries some 790 masons' marks on that stretch alone — circles, triangles, shapes like a bird's feather — the densest concentration in the castle; the sandstone was quarried on Torashima, one of the Tomogashima islands off Kada. Granite porphyry turns up at the Akazu-mon high wall, the Matsu-no-maru turret base and the Ichinaka-mon site, where blocks are cut to polygons and fitted without a gap. Above Tsuru-no-tani — a hollow named for the cranes the Asano kept there, and full of hydrangeas in early summer — rough Toyotomi-era work carries neater courses added later.

None of it costs anything: the walls stand in the open park, and only the keep charges (410 yen for adults, 200 yen for school pupils; 9:00-17:30, last entry 17:00, closed 29-31 December). Walking down from the summit to the foot of the hill is roughly walking forward in time — and in places the bedrock of Torafusu-yama itself breaks through between the stones.