Nagashino Castle

Overview

Nagashino Castle (長篠城, Nagashino-jō) was a fortification in the Muromachi period, built in 1508, the fifth year of the Eishō era. It stood on a bluff above the Toyokawa river in what is now the city of Shinshiro, in the eastern part of Aichi Prefecture. The castle is remembered above all as the site of the Battle of Nagashino in 1575, one of the decisive engagements of the Sengoku period, the century and a half of near-constant civil war that ended only with the unification of Japan at the end of the sixteenth century. The ruins are listed among the 100 Fine Castles of Japan, a selection maintained by the Japanese Castle Foundation.

History

Nagashino Castle was built in 1508 by Suganuma Sadanori, a local retainer of the Imagawa house, which then controlled the Tōkaidō coast road between Kyoto and the eastern provinces. The castle's position was chosen for control of that road and of the Toyokawa river crossing, and it changed hands repeatedly as the Imagawa lost ground to the rising powers of Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu.

By 1575 the castle was held for Tokugawa Ieyasu by Okudaira Sadamasa, with a garrison of a few hundred men. Takeda Katsuyori, who had inherited the Takeda domain from his father Shingen, brought an army against it and laid siege. The defenders held out and sent a messenger through the Takeda lines to request relief. Ieyasu and Oda Nobunaga answered with a combined force, and on 28 June 1575 the Battle of Nagashino was fought a short distance from the castle. The Takeda cavalry charges broke against massed volleys from Oda arquebusiers firing in rotation from behind wooden palisades, and the Takeda army was destroyed. The victory secured the Tokugawa hold on the region and removed the Takeda as a major power.

What Stands There Today

The castle was abandoned after the battle and its site gradually returned to farmland and woodland. In 1929 the ruins were designated a National Historic Site, the first former castle site in Japan to receive that protection. Earthworks survive: the outlines of the main enclosure, the dry moats, and the steep drop to the Toyokawa river that made the position defensible. A stone monument marks the site, and the Nagashino Castle Ruins Preservation Association maintains the grounds. The site is included in the 100 Fine Castles of Japan, and the battlefield itself, a short distance away, is marked separately.

The Name in Japanese

The castle's name is written 長篠城. Its reading in kana is ながしのじょう, and in romaji it is Nagashino-jō.

The name breaks into three characters:

長 — read naga here. The character means "long." It is one of the most common elements in Japanese place names and surnames, and it appears in the name of the province of Nagato and in the surname of the daimyō Chōsokabe, where the same character is read chō.

篠 — read shino here. The character names the dwarf bamboo, Sasa, a low, thin-stemmed bamboo that grows in dense thickets across the hills of central Honshu. It is a rare character in everyday Japanese, but it survives in place names and in the surname Shinozaki. The reading shino is a native Japanese reading, not a Chinese-derived one.

城 — read jō here. The character means "castle" or "fortress." In isolation it is also read shiro, and that is the everyday spoken word for a castle. When it follows another place name in a compound, as here, the reading is normally jō: Nagashino-jō, Himeji-jō, Osaka-jō.

Put together, the name means "the castle at Nagashino," where Nagashino is the older place name meaning "long bamboo-grass field." The suffix -jō is the standard way to say "castle" in the name of any Japanese castle, so a reader who learns this one character can name every castle in the country.

Visiting and Context

Nagashino Castle stands in Shinshiro, Aichi Prefecture, on the JR Iida line; the nearest station is Nagashinojō, a short walk from the ruins. The site is an open park with the earthworks and moats visible, and the Nagashino Castle Ruins Guidance Hall nearby displays finds from excavation and explains the siege. The battlefield of 1575 lies a few kilometres away, with its own markers and a museum, and the two are usually visited together.

For readers of Japanese, the castle is a useful study case. The name gives a native-reading place element (長, naga), a plant name in a rare character (篠, shino), and the standard castle suffix (城, jō), all in three characters. The same suffix appears in the names of hundreds of castles, and the same pattern — older place name plus -jō — explains almost all of them.