Wakasa Oniga Castle

Overview

Wakasa Oniga Castle (若桜鬼ヶ城, Wakasa Oniga-jō) is a ruined mountain castle in the town of Wakasa, in eastern Tottori Prefecture, in the San'in region of western Japan. It sits on a ridge at roughly 35.34° north, 134.40° east, overlooking the small valley town below. The castle was founded around 1200, at the very start of the Kamakura period, and it was abandoned in 1617, early in the Edo period. Its ruins were designated a National Historic Site in 2008, and the site is included in the Continued Top 100 Japanese Castles (続日本100名城, Zoku Nihon 100 Meijō), a list compiled by the Japanese Castle Foundation in 2017 to extend its original Top 100.

The castle is a yamajiro (山城, yamajiro), a mountain castle: rather than a flatland compound with a keep, it consists of a long spine of ridges and peaks fortified with earthen ramparts, dry moats and terraced enclosures. The Wakasa Domain (若桜藩, Wakasa-han) had its headquarters at the site, which is why the castle is tied to that domain in historical records.

History

The castle was established around 1200, in the second year of the Shōji era (正治, Shōji), during the Kamakura period. That dating places its foundation in the decades just after the Genpei War and the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate, when local warriors across the San'in region were fortifying ridges and mountain passes. The site's position above the Wakasa valley gave it control of routes running through the mountains of what is now eastern Tottori.

For most of its life the castle was a stronghold of regional families rather than a national centre of power. It reached its greatest importance in the Sengoku period (戦国時代, Sengoku jidai), the century and a half of civil war that ended in the early 1600s, when mountain castles of this type were the standard form of military architecture in Japan. The castle's life ended in 1617, when it was abandoned. That date falls within the first decades of the Edo period, when the Tokugawa shogunate's "one castle per domain" policy forced the dismantling of most fortifications in the country, leaving only one castle in each domain.

What Stands There Today

Nothing of the castle's buildings survives. What remains on the ridge are earthworks: flattened enclosures cut into the mountain top, earthen embankments, and the traces of dry moats. Because the castle was a mountain stronghold, its defences were built largely from soil and stone rather than timber and plaster, and those earthworks are what visitors walk through today.

The site was designated a National Historic Site in 2008, a status that protects the ruins and provides for their maintenance and interpretation. It is also listed among the Continued Top 100 Japanese Castles, a designation that has brought the site to wider attention among Japanese castle enthusiasts. The ruins sit within the town of Wakasa, which takes its name from the same locality.

The Name in Japanese

The castle's name in Japanese is 若桜鬼ヶ城, read わかさおにがじょう (Wakasa Oniga-jō).

• 若 (わか, waka) — "young". This is the first character of the place name Wakasa.
• 桜 (さ, sa) — "cherry tree, cherry blossom". Together, 若桜 (Wakasa) is the name of the town and the surrounding district. The combination literally suggests a "young cherry tree", and the reading wakasa is a place-name reading rather than the ordinary reading of the two characters.
• 鬼 (おに, oni) — "demon, ogre". In Japanese folklore an oni is a powerful, horned, human-like creature, often translated as "demon" or "ogre". Here it is part of the castle's own name.
• ヶ (が, ga) — a small kana character used inside names. It is a variant of 箇 and functions as a possessive or descriptive link, roughly "of" or "at". In place names and castle names it is extremely common, and it is written small, as ヶ rather than ケ.
• 城 (じょう, jō) — "castle". This is the standard final element in Japanese castle names, read jō when it follows another element, as in 大坂城 (Ōsaka-jō).

So the full name breaks down as Wakasa + Oni + ga + jō: "the demon castle of Wakasa". The oni element is the striking part. Castle names in Japan frequently carry a legendary or descriptive epithet, and "demon castle" names appear at several sites around the country, usually attached to a peak or a particularly forbidding position. The name 若桜鬼ヶ城 therefore identifies both the place (Wakasa) and the mountain on which the castle stood (Oniga, "the demon's").

Visiting and Context

Wakasa is a small town in the Chūgoku Mountains of eastern Tottori, on the route between the Japan Sea coast and the inland districts of Hyōgo and Okayama. The castle ruins are a walk up the ridge from the town, and the reward is the earthwork layout itself rather than reconstructed buildings: enclosures, embankments and moat traces spread along the summit.

The castle belongs to the wider story of the yamajiro, the mountain castle that dominated Japanese warfare from the fourteenth to the late sixteenth century. Readers studying Japanese will meet the vocabulary of these sites constantly: 山城 (yamajiro, mountain castle), 曲輪 (kuruwa, an enclosed terrace or bailey), 堀 (hori, moat), 土塁 (dorui, earthen rampart), and 天守 (tenshu, keep). Wakasa Oniga Castle is a good place to see the first four of those in the ground, and a reminder that most Japanese castles were never the white-walled keeps of popular imagination but ridges of earth and stone like this one, held for four centuries and then abandoned in 1617.