260px, drawings of Kanbe Castle is a

Japanese castle are fortresses constructed primarily of wood and stone. They evolved from the wooden stockades of earlier centuries and came into their best-known form in the 16th century. Castles in Japan were built to guard important or strategic sites, such a ...

located in the city of Suzuka, northern

Mie Prefecture is a Prefectures of Japan, prefecture of Japan located in the Kansai region of Honshu. Mie Prefecture has a population of 1,781,948 () and has a geographic area of . Mie Prefecture is bordered by Gifu Prefecture to the north, Shiga Prefecture an ...

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

. At the end of the

Edo period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

, Kanbe Castle was home to a cadet branch of the

Honda clan The is a Japanese family that claims descent from the medieval court noble Fujiwara no Kanemichi. The family settled in Mikawa and served the Matsudaira clan as retainers. Later, when the main Matsudaira family became the Tokugawa clan, the H ...

, ''

daimyō were powerful Japanese magnates, feudal lords who, from the 10th century to the early Meiji era, Meiji period in the middle 19th century, ruled most of Japan from their vast hereditary land holdings. They were subordinate to the shogun and no ...

'' of Kanbe Domain.

History

The original Kanebe Castle was founded by local warlord Kanbe Tomomori from 1532 to 1555, re-using many materials from an older fortification approximately 500 meters to the southwest. The Kanbe were a cadet branch of the

Kitabatake clan The Kitabatake clan was a clan that ruled south Ise Province in Japan and had strong ties to the eastern provinces through Pacific sea routes. Among its leaders included Kitabatake Tomonori. Clan heads # Kitabatake Masaie (1215–1274, founder ...

who ruled

Ise Province was a province of Japan in the area of Japan that is today includes most of modern Mie Prefecture. Ise bordered on Iga, Kii, Mino, Ōmi, Owari, Shima, and Yamato Provinces. Its abbreviated form name was . History The name of Ise appears ...

during much of the

Muromachi period The , also known as the , is a division of Japanese history running from approximately 1336 to 1573. The period marks the governance of the Muromachi or Ashikaga shogunate ( or ), which was officially established in 1338 by the first Muromachi ...

. Following

Oda Nobunaga was a Japanese ''daimyō'' and one of the leading figures of the Sengoku period, Sengoku and Azuchi-Momoyama periods. He was the and regarded as the first "Great Unifier" of Japan. He is sometimes referred as the "Demon Daimyō" and "Demo ...

's invasion of Ise Province, he installed his third son Oda Nobutaka as heir to the Kanbe clan. Under the name of Kanbe Nobutaka, he rebuilt the castle and strengthened its defenses. However, during the tumultuous

Sengoku period The was the period in History of Japan, Japanese history in which civil wars and social upheavals took place almost continuously in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Kyōtoku incident (1454), Ōnin War (1467), or (1493) are generally chosen as th ...

, the castle changed hands several times. Following the

Battle of Sekigahara The Battle of Sekigahara (Shinjitai: ; Kyūjitai: , Hepburn romanization: ''Sekigahara no Tatakai'') was an important battle in Japan which occurred on October 21, 1600 (Keichō 5, 15th day of the 9th month) in what is now Gifu Prefecture, ...

and the establishment of the

Tokugawa shogunate The Tokugawa shogunate, also known as the was the military government of Japan during the Edo period from 1603 to 1868. The Tokugawa shogunate was established by Tokugawa Ieyasu after victory at the Battle of Sekigahara, ending the civil wars ...

, the 50,000 ''

koku The is a Chinese-based Japanese unit of volume. One koku is equivalent to 10 or approximately , or about of rice. It converts, in turn, to 100 shō and 1,000 gō. One ''gō'' is the traditional volume of a single serving of rice (before co ...

'' Kanbe Domain was created for the Hitotsuyanagi clan. They were transferred in 1636, and the castle was destroyed. The domain given to a cadet branch of the Ishikawa clan with a much reduced '' kokudaka'' of 10,000 (later 20,000) ''koku'' from 1651 to 1732, and a '' jin'ya'' was built on the site of the old castle. The Ishikawa were followed by a cadet branch of the

(15,000 ''koku''), who ruled to the

Meiji restoration The , referred to at the time as the , and also known as the Meiji Renovation, Revolution, Regeneration, Reform, or Renewal, was a political event that restored Imperial House of Japan, imperial rule to Japan in 1868 under Emperor Meiji. Althoug ...

. Honda Tadamune received permission to rebuild the castle in 1746, and completed construction in 1748. The castle layout consists of a complex series of moats surrounding the main and secondary enclosures. The main enclosure housed the ''

tenshu is an architectural typology found in Japanese castle, Japanese castle complexes. They are easily identifiable as the highest tower within the castle. Common translations of ''tenshu'' include keep, main keep, or ''donjon''. ''Tenshu'' are cha ...

'' erected by Oda Nobutaka, which records indicate was compound structure with the main tower of five or six stories in the southwest and a smaller tower in the northeast, with

roof tile Roof tiles are overlapping tiles designed mainly to keep out precipitation such as rain or snow, and are traditionally made from locally available materials such as clay or slate. Later tiles have been made from materials such as concrete, glass ...

s decorated in

gold leaf upA gold nugget of 5 mm (0.2 in) in diameter (bottom) can be expanded through hammering into a gold foil of about 0.5 m2 (5.4 sq ft). The Japan.html" ;"title="Toi gold mine museum, Japan">Toi gold mine museum, Japan. Gold leaf is gold that has ...

. This was dismantled in 1595 and its materials used to build a three-story ''yagura'' at Kuwana Castle called the "Kanbe Yagura". In 1875, as per government decrees following the

Meiji Restoration The , referred to at the time as the , and also known as the Meiji Renovation, Revolution, Regeneration, Reform, or Renewal, was a political event that restored Imperial House of Japan, imperial rule to Japan in 1868 under Emperor Meiji. Althoug ...

, most of the remaining castle structures were demolished. All that survives in situ are portions of stone walls, the stone base of the ''tenshu'', and part of the moat of the main enclosure. The area is designated as a Historic Site of Mie Prefecture. Currently, the center of the castle is occupied by Kanbe Park, and Mie Prefectural Kanbe High School is relocated on the site of Ni-no-maru enclosure. Surviving structures in other locations include the Ni-no-maru Drum Tower, which is now used as the bell tower of the temple of Renka-ji in the Higashitamagaki neighborhood of Suzuka and the former Ōte-mon Gate of the castle, which has been relocated to Kenshō-ji in the Nishihinochō neighborhood of

Yokkaichi is a Cities of Japan, city located in Mie Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 310,259 in 142162 households and a population density of 1500 persons per km2. The total area of the city is . Geography Yokkaichi is located ...

. At the temple of Ryuko-ji near Kanbe Castle, there is the Zabou-tei

Shoin is a type of audience hall in Japanese architecture that was developed during the Muromachi period. The term originally meant a study and a place for lectures on the sūtra within a temple, but later it came to mean just a drawing room or stu ...

(a Mie Prefecture Tangible Cultural Property) built in 1747 by Honda Tadamune, the first Honda ''daimyō'' of Kanbe; however, this structure was relocated from Tokyo in modern times and is not a structure of the original castle. The castle is a ten-minute walk from Suzukashi Station on the Kintetsu Suzuka Line.

Literature

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External links

Kanbe Castle Jcastle Profile

Notes

{{reflist Castles in Mie Prefecture Ruined castles in Japan Honda clan Suzuka, Mie Designated historic sites of Mie Prefecture