Koriyama Castle

Look at the north face of the keep base and you will find a stone Jizo about 90 cm tall, built into the wall head down. An inscription dates it to 1523. The Nara basin had few quarries, so the builders took what was at hand: Buddhist statues, five-ring grave pagodas and, the story goes, foundation stones from the Rashomon gate of the old capital Heijo-kyo. When the walls were repaired, more than 600 reused stones came out of the fill.

Tsutsui Junkei built the castle around 1580. In 1585 Toyotomi Hidenaga, Hideyoshi's younger brother, made it his seat and enlarged it to roughly its final size. The Yanagisawa family arrived from Kai in 1724 and held it until the end of the Edo period. The buildings were taken down in 1873. Whether a keep ever stood here was argued about for a long time; a dig in 2014 found foundation stones and gold-leafed roof tiles on the platform, which settled it for most historians.

What you see now is mostly stone and water. The Otemon gate was rebuilt in 1983 and two turrets next to it by 1987, and in March 2021 the Gokuraku-bashi bridge over the inner moat came back after about 150 years. The keep base itself was repaired between 2013 and 2016 and opened as an observation deck in 2017. It is free, open 7:00 to 17:00 from October to March and to 19:00 from April to September. On a clear day you can pick out Wakakusayama, the roof of Todai-ji's Great Buddha Hall, Kofuku-ji's pagoda and Yakushi-ji to the east, and the Kongo and Katsuragi mountains to the west.

Cherry season is the busy time. About 600 trees, mostly Somei-yoshino, ring the moats, and the grounds were picked for the Japan Top 100 Cherry Blossom Spots in 1990. The Oshiro Matsuri runs through the blossom weeks with food stalls and lanterns lit in the evening; in 2026 it ran from 24 March to 7 April. It gets crowded on weekends then, and stalls take over the paths. The rest of the year the place is quiet, and a weekday visit pairs well with the goldfish streets below the castle.