Hayashi Castle

Overview

Hayashi Castle (林城, はやしじょう, Hayashi-jō) was a Japanese castle in what is now the city of Matsumoto, in Nagano prefecture. It was founded in 1459, in the third year of the Chōroku era, and remained in use until around 1550. For most of that century it served as the official residence of the shugo (守護, しゅご) — the military governor appointed to administer a province — of Shinano Province.

The castle belonged to the Ogasawara clan, the warrior house that governed Shinano during the Muromachi period (1336–1573). It is counted among the Ogasawara clan castle sites (小笠原氏城跡, おがさわらしじょうせき), a group of fortifications in and around Matsumoto. Hayashi Castle stood at coordinates 36.2249444, 138.0094444, in the mountainous interior of central Honshu.

History

The Ogasawara were one of the great families of the Muromachi shogunate, and Shinano Province was their power base. Hayashi Castle was built in 1459 as one of a series of strongholds through which they controlled the region. Its role was administrative as much as military: it functioned as the residence of the provincial governor, the seat from which Shinano was governed.

That arrangement held until roughly 1550, when the castle passed out of use. The century between its founding and its abandonment coincides with the slow collapse of Muromachi authority and the rise of the Sengoku period, the era of contending warlords. The Ogasawara themselves were drawn into that warfare, and their castles in Shinano changed hands more than once.

Hayashi Castle is closely associated with a neighbouring site, Igawa Castle. The two are treated together as a single historic property, and their ruins have been protected collectively as a National Historic Site since 2017.

What Stands There Today

Hayashi Castle was a yamashiro (山城, やまじろ) — a mountain castle, built on high ground and using the natural terrain for defence rather than relying on stone walls and tall towers of the kind later associated with Japanese castles. Fortifications of this type were the norm in the Muromachi period.

What survives at the site are earthworks: the shaped ridges, flattened enclosures and cut trenches that the defenders carved into the hillside. These are the physical remains that the National Historic Site designation protects. The site lies within the present-day boundaries of Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture.

The Name in Japanese

The castle's name is written 林城. It is read はやしじょう in kana, and rendered in romaji as Hayashi-jō.

The name breaks into two characters:

林 — read hayashi here. This character means "woods" or "grove". It is a pictograph of two trees standing side by side, and that doubled-tree image is exactly what it depicts: not a single tree but a stand of them. It is a common element in Japanese place names and surnames.

城 — read jō here. This means "castle". On its own the character can also be read shiro, and that is the everyday Japanese word for a castle. When it appears as the second element of a castle's name, as here, the reading shifts to jō, which is why the compound is Hayashi-jō rather than Hayashi-shiro.

Note that jō is the same character and the same reading used in yamashiro's alternative form yamajō — the word for a mountain castle. A reader who learns 城 once will meet it in nearly every castle name in Japan.

The full name therefore means, plainly, "Woods Castle" — a castle in or by a grove. Names of this kind were common for mountain fortifications, which were often named for the terrain they occupied rather than for a founder or a family.

Visiting and Context

Hayashi Castle is one of the Ogasawara clan castle sites, a group of Muromachi-period fortifications in the Matsumoto area. Together with Igawa Castle, its ruins form part of a National Historic Site designated in 2017.

Matsumoto lies in Nagano prefecture, in the centre of Honshu. The city is best known today for Matsumoto Castle, a sixteenth-century keep that is one of Japan's surviving original castles — a very different kind of structure from the earlier mountain forts of the Ogasawara. Seeing the two side by side, so to speak, makes the development of Japanese fortification legible: from earthwork ridges on a hillside to stone-walled keeps surrounded by moats.

For a reader of Japanese, the site is a useful reminder that the vocabulary of castles runs deep in the language. 城 appears in names, in place names, and in the everyday word shiro. The Ogasawara name itself, 小笠原, is likewise a common surname in modern Japan, carried by people with no connection to the medieval province their ancestors governed.