Itami Castle

Overview

Itami Castle (伊丹城, Itami-jō) was a Japanese castle in Kawabe District of northern Settsu Province, on the site of what is now the city of Itami in Hyōgo Prefecture. It is also known as Arioka Castle (有岡城 or 在岡城, Arioka-jō). The castle belonged to the Muromachi period and was destroyed in 1583, in the eleventh year of the Tenshō era (天正, Tenshō), during the Azuchi–Momoyama period. Its most famous moment was the Siege of Itami. The ruins stand directly in front of Itami Station and have been protected as a National Historic Site since 1979.

History

Itami Castle was built in the Muromachi period in Kawabe District, in the northern part of Settsu Province. Settsu covered roughly the area of modern Osaka and Hyōgo Prefectures, and the castle's position in the north of the province placed it on the roads between Kyoto and the Inland Sea.

The castle is also called Arioka Castle, and it is under that name that it appears in the accounts of the Siege of Itami. The siege is the event for which the site is chiefly remembered, and it is the conflict tied to the castle in the records of the period.

The end came in 1583, in the eleventh year of Tenshō, during the Azuchi–Momoyama period. That era, spanning 1573 to 1603, was the age of the three unifiers — Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu — when castles across Japan were besieged, dismantled or rebuilt as the country was brought under a single authority. Itami Castle was destroyed in that process.

What Stands There Today

Nothing of the castle keep or walls survives as a standing structure. What remains is the site itself, and it has been protected as a National Historic Site since 1979.

The ruins lie immediately in front of Itami Station, which makes this an unusual castle site: rather than a mountain top or a rural plain, the ground associated with Itami Castle sits at the doorstep of a busy commuter railway station in a city of the northern Osaka conurbation. The city of Itami grew up around this location, and the modern station takes its name from the same place.

The Name in Japanese

The castle's name is written 伊丹城.

• Reading in kana: いたみじょう
• Romaji: Itami-jō

Broken down character by character:

• 伊 — read i here. This kanji is one of the oldest Chinese characters used in Japanese place names. On its own it carries the sense of "that one" or "he," and it appears in classical Chinese texts as a pronoun. In Japanese it has no common everyday meaning; its main work is in names, above all in the old province name Ise (伊勢) and in the city name Itami.
• 丹 — read tami here. Its basic meaning is "red," specifically the reddish earth used as a pigment, cinnabar or vermilion. It also came to mean the colour red generally, and by extension something sincere or wholehearted, as in the phrase 丹誠 (tansei, "sincere devotion"). In place names it often points to red soil or to land where ochre was dug.
• 城 — read jō here. This is the standard kanji for "castle." It is the character used in the names of nearly every Japanese castle, from 大阪城 (Ōsaka-jō) to 姫路城 (Himeji-jō). When it appears alone as a common noun it is usually read shiro, but in compound castle names it takes the Sino-Japanese reading jō.

So 伊丹城 is a straightforward construction: the place name Itami, written with two kanji that function purely as sound and place markers, plus 城, "castle." The same two characters, 伊丹, name the modern city and the station in front of the ruins.

The alternative name, Arioka Castle, is written 有岡城 or 在岡城. Both versions end in 岡 (oka, "hill" or "rising ground"), which fits a castle site on elevated ground; the first character differs between the two spellings.

Visiting and Context

The site is in Itami, in Hyōgo Prefecture, at coordinates 34.7812944, 135.4208917. Itami Station is the reference point: the castle ruins are located just in front of it, so the site is reached on foot from the station rather than by a dedicated approach road or mountain trail.

For readers of Japanese, Itami Castle is a useful name to know for three reasons. First, 城 (jō) is one of the most productive characters in Japanese place names, and seeing it here in a compound reading reinforces the shiro / jō split. Second, 伊丹 gives the kanji behind a familiar modern city and station name, which is exactly the kind of everyday word that learners meet on a rail map before they meet it in a history book. Third, the castle's second name, Arioka, shows how a single site can carry two entirely different names in the sources, a common situation in Japanese history that is worth recognising early.

The castle's dates place it firmly in the Azuchi–Momoyama period, the decades of unification that followed the long Muromachi period. Its destruction in 1583, in Tenshō 11, belongs to the same years in which Toyotomi Hideyoshi was consolidating control over the Kinai region around Kyoto and Osaka. The Siege of Itami is the event attached to the site, and the National Historic Site designation of 1979 is what protects the ground today.