Ōtawara Castle

Overview

Ōtawara Castle (大田原城, Ōtawara-jō) is a Japanese castle in Ōtawara, a city in the southern part of Tochigi Prefecture. It was founded in 1545, in the 14th year of the Tenbun era (天文, Tenbun), during the Muromachi period (1336–1573). For the whole of the Edo period it was the seat of a branch of the Ōtawara clan, the daimyō (大名, daimyō — a lord who held a domain large enough to be assessed for military service) of Ōtawara Domain. The castle also carried the poetic name "Dragon Castle" (龍城, Ryū-jō).

History

Ōtawara Castle was established in 1545, the 14th year of Tenbun, in the closing decades of the Muromachi period. This was an age in which central authority had collapsed and regional warlords fortified their own territories; a castle founded at this date belongs to that world of local strongholds rather than to the later, centrally regulated castle system.

The site is recorded as the birthplace of Fujita Yoshiharu (藤田吉春). The Ōtawara clan, who held the castle, survived the upheavals of the late sixteenth century and entered the Edo period as the lords of Ōtawara Domain, a position they maintained throughout that era. The castle therefore spans two very different ages: it began as a Muromachi-period fortification and ended as the administrative and residential centre of an Edo-period domain.

What Stands There Today

Ōtawara is today a city in southern Tochigi Prefecture, and the castle site lies within it. The castle's identity is preserved in its name and in the memory of the Ōtawara clan whose branch held it across the Edo period.

The Name in Japanese

The castle's name in Japanese is 大田原城.

• Kana reading: おおたわらじょう
• Romaji: Ōtawara-jō

Broken down character by character:

• 大 — read here as ō (おお). Meaning: "big" or "great". On its own the character is read ō or dai; in this name it carries the long ō at the start.
• 田 — read here as ta (た). Meaning: "rice field". Rice fields were the basic unit of agricultural wealth and taxation in premodern Japan, and the character appears in a great many place names.
• 原 — read here as wara (わら). Meaning: "plain", "field" or "open ground". Together, 大田原 (Ōtawara) is a place name — literally something like "great rice-field plain".
• 城 — read here as jō (じょう). Meaning: "castle". This is the standard character for a Japanese castle and appears in castle names across the country.

The reading of the first three characters as a unit, Ōtawara, is a name reading that cannot be predicted from the individual characters alone; the fourth, 城, is read jō in compound castle names. Note the long vowel at the start: 大 is o plus a second o, written ō in romaji and おお in kana. The alternative name, Dragon Castle, is written 龍城 and read Ryū-jō — 龍 (りゅう, ryū) meaning "dragon" and 城 again meaning "castle".

Visiting and Context

Ōtawara sits in southern Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo on the Kantō Plain. The castle's coordinates place it at roughly 36.87° north and 140.03° east, within the present city of Ōtawara.

For a reader of Japanese, the castle is a useful study case in how place names work. The name combines a place-name element (大田原) with the ubiquitous castle character 城, and the same 城 appears in the alternative name 龍城. Learning to recognise 城 as jō unlocks a large family of castle names, and learning that 大田原 is read Ōtawara rather than by its individual character readings is a lesson in the gap between kanji and pronunciation that runs through Japanese place names generally. The castle's foundation in Tenbun 14 (1545) also gives a fixed point for the era name 天文, one of the many nengō (年号, nengō — era names) that Japanese history uses as a dating system alongside the Western calendar.