Nagoya Castle

Overview

Nagoya Castle (名古屋城, Nagoya-jō) is a Japanese castle in Nagoya, in the Naka-ku ward of central Japan. It is counted among the three great castles of Japan and appears on the list of the 100 Fine Castles of Japan. The castle was the headquarters of the Owari Domain, one of the most powerful feudal territories of the Edo period, and it anchored the castle town that grew into the modern city of Nagoya.

The site's history runs from the Muromachi period, when a castle was first built there in 1532, the first year of the Tenbun era, through to the twentieth century, when the castle was partly destroyed in the bombing of Nagoya during World War II.

History

The first castle on the site dates to 1532, in the Muromachi period. The Oda clan held a castle there during the Sengoku period, the century of civil war that preceded the unification of Japan.

In 1612, during the Edo period, the Owari Domain constructed Nagoya Castle on that earlier site. The Owari were one of the three branch houses of the Tokugawa shogunal family, and their castle became the heart of one of the most important castle towns in Japan. That town, Nagoya-juku, was a post station on the Minoji road, which linked two of the Edo Five Routes, the Tōkaidō and the Nakasendō. The castle's position on this junction made it a hub of travel and commerce as well as of military power.

Ownership of the castle passed to the city in 1930, transferred by the Imperial Household Ministry. In 1945, during the bombing of Nagoya in World War II, the castle was partially destroyed. Reconstruction and repair have been under way since 1957.

The castle is also associated with the Aomatsuba Incident, an event in the castle's history that carries its own name in Japanese records.

What Stands There Today

The castle grounds contain surviving and reconstructed structures, among them the Honmaru First South Gate, the Fumei Gate, and the East First Gate (東一之門). These gates belong to the castle's defensive layout, the series of walled enclosures and controlled entry points that governed movement through a Japanese castle.

The castle's cultural weight is visible in the institutions that borrow its name. Meijō (名城), a shortened pronunciation of Nagoya Castle, appears in Meijō Park, in the Meijō Line of the Nagoya Municipal Subway, and in the name of Meijo University. The castle has also historically been called Kinjō (金城), meaning "Golden Castle", and Kinjo Gakuin University takes its name from that form.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is 名古屋城. It is read なごやじょう in kana, and written Nagoya-jō in romaji. The final element, じょう, is the native Japanese reading of the character for castle; when it appears in compound names it is usually voiced as -jō rather than -shiro.

Breaking the name down character by character:

• 名 — read な (na) here. The character means "name" or "reputation". In this word it carries no independent meaning; it is a phonetic building block of the place name Nagoya.
• 古 — read ご (go) here. The character means "old" or "ancient". As with 名, its role in 名古屋 is as a sound element rather than a description.
• 屋 — read や (ya) here. The character means "roof", "house", or "shop". It is a very common ending in Japanese place names and family names, and again functions here as part of the sound of Nagoya.
• 城 — read じょう (jō) here. The character means "castle". This is the element that tells the reader what kind of place is being named, and it is the same character that appears in the names of castles across Japan.

So the name is best understood in two layers: 名古屋 (Nagoya) is the place, written with characters whose individual meanings do not add up to a description, and 城 (jō) is the ordinary noun for a castle. A learner who knows only 城 can already recognise the last character of hundreds of castle names.

Two alternative readings of the same name are worth knowing. 名城 (Meijō) uses the characters for "famous" and "castle", and 金城 (Kinjō) uses the characters for "gold" and "castle". Both are read as shortened, alternate pronunciations of Nagoya Castle rather than as separate names for a different place.

Visiting and Context

Nagoya Castle sits at coordinates 35.1855556, 136.8986111, in Naka-ku, the central ward of Nagoya. The city that surrounds it grew out of the castle town the Owari Domain established in 1612, and the castle remains the reference point for the street layout and institutions of central Nagoya.

For a learner of Japanese, the castle is a useful anchor for several strands of the language and history at once. Its name teaches the character 城 and the reading -jō, which recurs constantly in Japanese place names. Its alternate names, Meijō and Kinjō, show how a single landmark can generate a family of related words that then spread into parks, subway lines, and universities. And its dates place it at the meeting point of two periods that shape how Japanese history is taught: the Sengoku wars of the sixteenth century and the settled Edo order of the seventeenth.