Japan’s castle keep gets a human tow back to its roots

Preservation tends to sound noble until someone has to move 360 tonnes of castle keep by hand. In Hirosaki, in Japan’s Aomori prefecture, about 1,800 people spent the weekend doing exactly that, pulling the keep of Hirosaki Castle a little more than two metres closer to its original position on rails and rollers. The spectacle had its own rhythm: ropes, rotating teams and chants of “so-re, so-re”, which is as close as public heritage work comes to a communal test of endurance.

The move was not a flourish for the cameras. The keep had to be shifted so that a damaged wall, hit in a major earthquake, could be repaired. Officials chose hikiya, a traditional Japanese relocation method that avoids dismantling the building and instead moves it on rollers. On Saturday the structure was towed 1.13 metres; on Sunday it advanced another 1.09 metres. Each team had 80 people pulling on 30-metre ropes, which is a fairly literal interpretation of civic participation.

The city says demand for the task was far beyond supply. Kensuke Hayasaka, head of the parks and green spaces division at Hirosaki City, said there were about 8,000 applications for 1,800 places over the two days, roughly four times more than available slots. Participants came not only from Hirosaki, but from across Japan and from abroad, including south-east Asia, Europe and North America. Apparently the chance to haul a castle has a wider appeal than most municipal projects.

This was not the first time the city has asked residents to lend their muscles. In 2015, Hirosaki put out a call for people to take part directly, creating what officials described as the first citizen-driven hikiya and the first time in a century that the method had been used in any form to move a castle. The wall work was completed in December 2024, with all 2,185 stones restacked where they belonged. Only then could the keep be brought back toward its proper base.

The hand-pulling will continue until the end of August, with about 4,100 people scheduled to move the keep a total of 5 metres. The remaining roughly 73 metres will be handled by machinery by the end of the year. The symbolic part is for the volunteers; the rest, as usual, is for the machines.

Hirosaki Castle is one of only 12 castle keeps left in Japan and the only one in the north-eastern Tohoku region. It was completed in 1611 as the seat of the Tsugaru clan, but the original keep burned down after lightning struck a gunpowder store in 1627. The current structure was rebuilt in 1810 and now anchors a park that draws about 2 million visitors each year during cherry-blossom season.

For the time being, those visitors will have to stay away. Once the keep is back on its original base, preservation work on the structure will begin and the whole building will be covered over. Hirosaki City expects it to reopen to visitors in 2033. Heritage, in other words, is being saved the old-fashioned way: slowly, expensively, and with very limited access to the public that is supposed to cherish it.

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com