Kōchi Castle

Overview

Kōchi Castle (高知城, Kōchi-jō) is a Japanese castle in the city of Kōchi, on the island of Shikoku. Construction began in 1601, the sixth year of the Keichō era (慶長, けいちょう), and the castle served as the seat of Tosa Domain (土佐藩, Tosa-han) until 1871. It sits on Otakayama hill in the Marunouchi district, at the centre of Kōchi city, which occupies the most prosperous part of the former Tosa Province. The castle is counted among the 100 Fine Castles of Japan (日本100名城, Nihon Hyaku Meijō), a list maintained by the Japanese Castle Foundation.

History

The castle was founded in 1601 by Yamauchi Kazutoyo, the first lord of Tosa Domain. The Yamauchi were a tozama clan — a house outside the Tokugawa family's hereditary vassals — and held Tosa under the Tokugawa Shogunate for the whole of the domain's existence, from 1601 to 1871. The site chosen was Otakayama, a hill commanding the centre of the Kōchi Plain.

The castle's fabric has twice been shaped by fire. A conflagration destroyed much of the structure, and the castle was subsequently renovated; the keep and other buildings that stand on the hill today are the product of that rebuilding. The castle grounds were designated a National Historic Site in 1959, and the protected area was expanded in 2014.

What Stands There Today

The castle complex on Otakayama preserves a group of buildings reconstructed after the fire, including the tenshu, the keep that forms the visual centrepiece of the hill. Because the castle was the administrative heart of Tosa Domain, the site is also the physical record of the domain's government: the Marunouchi district around the hill takes its name from the castle's inner enclosure, the maru no uchi, or "inside the circle". The National Historic Site designation, granted in 1959 and extended in 2014, covers the castle site itself.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is 高知城. It is read こうちじょう in kana, and romanised as Kōchi-jō. The name breaks into three kanji:

• 高 — read here as こう (kō), the first element of the place name. The character means "high" or "tall". On its own it is also read たか (taka), which is the native Japanese reading.
• 知 — read here as ち (chi), the second element of the place name. The character means "to know" or "knowledge". Its native Japanese reading is し (shi), as in 知る (shiru), "to know".
• 城 — read here as じょう (jō), meaning "castle". This is the standard suffix for castle names across Japan, as in 大阪城 (Ōsaka-jō) and 姫路城 (Himeji-jō). The native Japanese reading of the character is しろ (shiro), the everyday word for a castle.

Two points are worth noting for learners. First, 高知 is a place name, not a descriptive phrase: the characters "high" and "know" do not combine into a literal meaning here, and the reading こうち (Kōchi) is the name of both the city and the prefecture. Second, when 城 follows a place name it is almost always read じょう, so the pattern 地名 + 城 → 地名 + じょう is a reliable one for reading castle names aloud.

Visiting and Context

Kōchi Castle stands in the Marunouchi district of Kōchi city, on Otakayama hill, at the centre of the Kōchi Plain. The castle is one of the 100 Fine Castles of Japan, and its grounds are a National Historic Site, first designated in 1959 with the protected area expanded in 2014. For readers studying Japanese, the castle is a useful anchor for the history of the Yamauchi clan and Tosa Domain, which governed the region from 1601 until 1871 — the same span during which the castle functioned as the domain's headquarters. The name itself repays attention: 高知城, read こうちじょう, combines a place name with the ubiquitous castle suffix 城, read じょう.