Fushimi Castle

Timeline

1. 1591

   Retirement villa begun

   Toyotomi Hideyoshi yields the regency and Jurakudai to his nephew Hidetsugu and begins a retirement villa at Shigetsu in Fushimi.

2. 1594

   Hideyoshi enters Shigetsu-Fushimi

   Major civil works including the rerouting of the Uji River accompany the build; Hideyoshi formally takes residence in the new castle complex.

3. Aug 1596

   Keicho-Fushimi earthquake

   Newly completed Shigetsu-Fushimi Castle is wrecked; the upper two stories of the keep collapse and 73 ladies-in-waiting and 500 attendants are killed.

4. 1597

   Kohatayama keep completed

   The replacement Kohatayama Fushimi Castle one kilometer northeast is finished in the 5th month and Hideyoshi moves in.

5. 1598

   Hideyoshi dies at Fushimi

   Toyotomi Hideyoshi dies in the keep on the 18th day of the 8th month; per his will Hideyori moves to Osaka and Ieyasu takes residence at Fushimi.

6. 1600

   Siege of Fushimi

   Ishida Mitsunari's coalition of 40,000 storms the castle; castellan Torii Mototada and ~1,800 defenders hold for eleven days before committing seppuku.

7. 1602

   Tokugawa rebuild

   After Sekigahara, Ieyasu rebuilds Fushimi on the Kohatayama plan with Todo Takatora as works commissioner; the works finish in late 1602.

8. 1603

   Ieyasu's shogunal investiture

   Tokugawa Ieyasu receives the seii-taishogun title at Fushimi, the first of three Tokugawa shogun investitures hosted here through 1623.

9. 1619

   Demolition ordered

   Decommissioning is decreed in Genna 5; dismantling begins the next year and parts are reused at Nijo, Yodo, Fukuyama and other castles.

10. Genroku era

    Hill renamed Momoyama

    Peach trees are planted on the former castle site; the hill comes to be called Momoyama, the source of the Azuchi-Momoyama era name.

11. 1912

    Emperor Meiji's tomb built

    The imperial mausoleum of Emperor Meiji is constructed on the former main bailey, turning the castle core into a state sanctuary.

12. 1964

    Replica keep erected

    A reinforced-concrete connected-donjon replica is built as the centerpiece of the Fushimi-Momoyama Castle Land theme park.

13. 2003

    Theme park closes

    Fushimi-Momoyama Castle Land shuts down; the replica keep is closed internally and remains accessible only as exterior viewing.

14. 2007

    Grounds reopened

    The castle grounds reopen for public outer-circuit walking with the keep interior still closed, the configuration in place today.

Detailed History

The origins of Fushimi Castle trace back to 1591, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi handed his regency and the Jurakudai palace to his nephew Hidetsugu and began a retirement villa at Shigetsu on the Fushimi peninsula. Full-scale construction began in 1592 during the Bunroku-era Korean campaign, with workers diverting the Uji River to create the moat in a massive tenka-bushin (national levy) public works campaign. Hideyoshi entered the new Shigetsu-Fushimi Castle in 1594 and it was formally completed in 1596 — only to be wrecked weeks later when the Keicho-Fushimi earthquake collapsed the upper two stories of the keep and killed 73 ladies-in-waiting and 500 attendants. Hideyoshi shifted the castle one kilometer northeast onto Kohata hill, with a new keep completed in 1597 — the so-called Kohatayama Fushimi Castle. He died there in the 8th month of 1598. Per his deathbed instructions Toyotomi Hideyori moved to Osaka Castle and Tokugawa Ieyasu, senior elder of the regency council, took residence at Fushimi and governed in Hideyori's stead. When Ieyasu marched on Aizu in 1600, an Ishida Mitsunari coalition led by Kobayakawa Hideaki and Shimazu Yoshihiro attacked Fushimi with 40,000 troops; castellan Torii Mototada held the keep for eleven days with about 1,800 defenders before all committed seppuku, and the buildings burned. The blood-soaked floorboards are traditionally said to have been enshrined as ceiling boards in Kyoto's Yogen-in, Genko-an and Hosen-in temples. After Sekigahara, Ieyasu rebuilt Fushimi in 1601-1602 under works commissioner Todo Takatora and used it for his own investiture as shogun in 1603 — the first of three Tokugawa shogun investitures (Ieyasu 1603, Hidetada 1605, Iemitsu 1623) staged at Fushimi. The castle was demolished from 1619, its dismantled buildings and timbers redistributed to Nijo Castle, Yodo Castle and Fukuyama Castle. Peach trees planted on the former site in the Genroku era gave the hill the name Momoyama, in turn naming the entire Azuchi-Momoyama era of late-sixteenth-century Japan. In 1912 the mausoleum of Emperor Meiji was built on the old main bailey, and in 1964 a reinforced-concrete replica keep was erected nearby as the centerpiece of Fushimi-Momoyama Castle Land, which closed in 2003 leaving the keep an exterior-only landmark.

Cultural Significance

Fushimi Castle is the literal source of the era name Azuchi-Momoyama — peach-mountain derives from the trees planted on the castle's ruined hill in the late seventeenth century, and now denotes the entire age of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi from roughly 1568 to 1603. Few castles can claim such etymological weight in periodization. The site also concentrates an unusual trio of dramatic endings: collapse in the 1596 earthquake, destruction by fire in the 1600 siege, and bureaucratic demolition in 1623. The blood-ceiling tradition (chi-tenjo) preserves the 1600 garrison's seppuku in temple ceilings across Kyoto — Yogen-in, Genko-an and Hosen-in — an almost unique case in which battlefield relics survive scattered through nearby religious architecture. The 1912 imperial mausoleum on the former honmaru converted the central castle ground into a state-managed sanctuary closed to visitors — a rare case of an entire castle core becoming a place of imperial cult. The 1964 replica keep holds no cultural-property designation and has been closed internally since 2003. Genuine surviving Fushimi-era structures are dispersed as relocated buildings — the karamon of Nijo Castle and the National Treasure karamon of Nishi Hongan-ji.

Architectural Details

Hideyoshi's Kohatayama Fushimi Castle placed a five-tier keep at the northwest corner of the main bailey, with the second bailey to the west, the Matsu-no-maru to the northeast and the Nagoya-maru to the southeast; together with the third bailey, the Yamazato-maru and exterior outworks the plan included twelve enclosures, in a concentric layout commentators noted resembled Hideyoshi's own Nagoya Castle in Hizen. The Tokugawa rebuild followed the same plan but abandoned the northwestern Danjo-maru, Okura-maru, Tokuzen-maru and Ohanabata-sanso enclosures with their moats, rebuilt the stone walls afresh and shifted the keep base to the northern part of the main bailey. Excavated roof tiles confirm the Tokugawa keep still bore the Toyotomi paulownia crest. The 1964 reinforced-concrete replica built as the centerpiece of Fushimi-Momoyama Castle Land is a connected-donjon design — a five-tier six-story main keep paired with a three-tier four-story small keep — reproducing Momoyama flourishes of chidori-hafu and kara-hafu gables, plastered white walls and gold-leaf-style shibi finials. Its location sits 400 meters northeast of the historical keep base, and its scale and materials do not match the original. The most significant surviving Fushimi-era fabric is found in relocated form: the Karamon at Nijo Castle and the National Treasure Karamon at Nishi Hongan-ji.