Kagoshima (Tsurumaru) Castle Ruins

Kagoshima, Japan, Japan

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Kagoshima Castle, commonly called Tsurumaru Castle, is the ruined seat of the powerful Shimazu clan in Kagoshima City, Kagoshima Prefecture, built in 1601 by Shimazu Iehisa, the first daimyō of the Satsuma Domain, as a modest hilltop castle whose main tower was never completed and whose military center was on the rear Shiroyama hill while the administrative center was in the daimyō’s residence at the foot of the mountain.

Because the Shimazu clan had been on the losing side at the Battle of Sekigahara just a year earlier, Iehisa deliberately built a relatively small and simple castle to avoid giving the Tokugawa shogunate a reason to attack Satsuma, and the castle remained the clan’s main residence and offices until it was destroyed by fire in 1873–1874 and never rebuilt, leaving only moats, stone walls, and some gate structures.

Today, the site is known as Kagoshima (Tsurumaru) Castle Ruins and functions as a public park and cultural area where visitors can walk along the old stone walls and moats, see the impressive rebuilt Goromon Gate (completed in 2020, Japan’s largest castle gate, about 20 meters high and wide), and visit Reimeikan, the Kagoshima Prefectural Center for Historical Material, which displays statues of major figures such as Saigō Takamori and St. Francis Xavier and introduces the history of Kagoshima and the Shimazu clan.