Visit Nagoya Castle

Nagoya Castle was one of the great castles of Japan, burned in a single night in 1945 and rebuilt twice: once fast, in concrete, and once slowly, in wood. Knowing which part is which makes the visit.

A castle built to hold a road

Tokugawa Ieyasu won the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and spent the next years making sure nobody could undo it. Nagoya sat on the Tokaido, the road between Edo and Kyoto, and the Toyotomi family still held Osaka Castle to the west. In 1610 he ordered a new castle here and made twenty feudal lords pay for the stone walls, among them Kato Kiyomasa, the most famous wall builder of the age. Their gangs carved their lords' crests into the stones so that nobody would mix up whose work was whose, and you can still find hundreds of them.

The keep was finished in December 1612 and the Honmaru Palace in 1615, for Ieyasu's ninth son Yoshinao. His line, the Owari Tokugawa, became the senior of the three branch houses that could supply a shogun. In 1930 the castle became Japan's first castle to be named a national treasure, with 24 structures listed.

One night in May 1945

On 14 May 1945 an American incendiary raid burned the main keep, the small keep, the palace and the golden shachihoko. Three corner turrets and a gate survived, and so did most of the palace's painted screens and ceiling panels, which had been taken down and stored. More than a thousand of them are now Important Cultural Properties.

Nagoya rebuilt the keep quickly, in steel and reinforced concrete, and reopened it on 3 October 1959 with a new pair of golden shachihoko. For sixty years it was a museum with a lift. Then it aged, and in May 2018 it closed because it could not be made safe in a strong earthquake. The city's plan is a full wooden rebuild based on prewar surveys and photographs, which is why the official site says the keep "cannot be entered", and why no reopening date is on any calendar.

The palace, room by room

The rebuild took nine years and was done the old way: hinoki cypress from the Kiso valley, hand-cut joints, copper fittings made by craftsmen, and every screen painting copied from the saved originals. It opened in stages, the entrance and the main audience hall in 2013, the private audience rooms in 2016 and the whole palace in June 2018. Start at the Genkan, the entrance hall, where tigers and leopards stalk across gold leaf to impress arriving lords. The Omote-shoin was the formal audience hall. The Jorakuden, added in 1634 for the third shogun Iemitsu's stay on his way to Kyoto, is the most lavish part of the building, all painted ceilings and carved transoms.

When to go and how long to stay

Allow two hours: forty minutes to an hour in the palace, the rest on the walls, the turrets and the gardens. Come at 9:00 on a weekday if you want the rooms to yourself, or in late March and early April when the cherry trees around the moat bloom and the whole city comes to look. The ticket costs 1,000 yen for adults from October 2026. A guided tour adds the stories behind the screens and the crests, and the best ones finish with lunch on Kinshachi Yokocho by the gate.

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