Castles

For something a little different, I saw two castles today. They’re both reconstructions built in the last century, but I’m assured they’re faithful copies (although it does explain why the one is in the center of town, next to the train station, instead of in some defensible location).

The first, “Turtle Castle” only has a couple of towers restored. But they have a small museum with detailed pictures of the construction materials used. I’m amused to note that the thick white walls you see all over are apparently just a beefy version of lath and plaster made with large bamboo sticks. And it was apparently easier to use tree trunks whole as support beams than mill them into a more manageable size.








The second (Toyoda Castle) is a complete restoration (outside at least), and is impressive given that I’ve never seen an old building here more than three stories high and those are rare. This is seven stories (and you can tell it’s Japanese instead of Chinese because it doesn’t taper at the top – isn’t it amazing what completely useless information they choose to translate?). They’ve filled it with a really nice museum. Part of it is devoted to some poet I’m too uncouth to have heard of, but the displays of agricultural tools were really well done. I just can’t figure out why a culture that had a really advanced foot-powered portable water wheel to keep rice paddies wet had a hand-cranked spinning wheel. But they did have a display of snow-shoe looking things that I assume are used to walk across wet rice paddies. They also had a samurai display, complete with several katana blades. Those are really quite pretty (if anything that deadly can be called pretty).

And if you count the torii I walked through to get to the farm stand as a church, I actually managed to get in two castles and one church today.