I Want A Shogun Castle

Nijo Castle is amazingly cool, one of the coolest places we visited in Kyoto. Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first Tokugawa shogun, built it about 600 years ago as his permanent residence. It takes a certain degree of nerve to build yourself a castle scarcely a mile from the Imperial Palace. You get the sense that Ieyasu wanted the Emperor where he could keep an eye on him; the Emperor is the official mascot, after all.

The castle has a moat, like any reasonable castle, and guardhouses and such (why doesn’t my apartment have a guardhouse?), but isn’t as heavily fortified as a lot of other shogun castles—it was a home, not a fortress. Then again, the floors contain a clever intruder-alert system: the floorboards are deliberately loose and have hollows underneath so that they squeak loudly whenever you walk on them. (No ninjas are going to sneak down those halls! Why doesn’t my apartment have ninja defenses?)

But the defenses are only half the coolness of Nijo. The whole thing is also covered with amazing artwork, from the wood engravings above all the entrances to the just-barely-irregular ceiling tiles to the fantastical wall paintings of incredibly detailed and beautiful nature scenes. It was from these latter, and from the formal gardens surrounding the castle, that I began to form my understanding of the Japanese idea of nature.

All this is coolness which I think was quite deliberate on the part of Ieyasu Tokugawa and his architects; other coolness that I experienced came from my cultural distance. For instance, it had never before occurred to me that medieval Japan invented the seemingly modern idea of flex space. The castle interior consists of a single, ninja-proof corridor looping around a number of internal rooms. The rooms have very little furniture—a traditional Japanese room was appointed with cushions and a few low tables, and very little else—and are connected to each other by sliding screens. If you open all the screens between them, you can turn two adjacent rooms into a single large room, exactly as in a corporate conference center. Tatami mats (why doesn’t my apartment have tatami mats?) even bear a resemblance to today’s floor and ceiling tiles, although they serve a very different purpose.

Nijo Castle was insanely cool. I’d like a shogun castle for my birthday, please, if you were thinking of getting me a present. There are plenty of them in Japan, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be too expensive if everyone I know were to pool all their money, and perhaps rob a few banks. It’d be very nice.