Matsuyama Castle Small Tower Keep

A second keep at the southeast corner

Matsuyama Castle Small Tower Keep (松山城小天守, Kotenshu) is a two-storied wooden turret standing at the southeast corner of the connected keep compound of Matsuyama Castle in Marunouchi, Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, rebuilt in the late Showa era and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on September 10, 2019.

The building occupies one of the four corners of a walled quadrangle. Matsuyama Castle uses the renritsu-shiki plan, in which the great keep, a smaller keep and corner turrets are placed at the four corners of a square and joined by connecting turrets, leaving an enclosed courtyard in the middle. Only Himeji Castle shares this arrangement among the twelve castles in Japan that still have pre-modern keeps. The Small Tower Keep is the second largest building in that ring, with a floor area of 98 square metres.

Its history is a sequence of fires. The original was destroyed on New Year's Day of 1784 when lightning struck the keep compound. Rebuilding took decades, and the replacement was completed in 1854, four months before Commodore Perry's second visit to Japan. That building burned again in 1933, this time by arson, together with the two corner turrets, the Tamon Turret and the Ten-Bay Corridor. What visitors walk through today is the wooden reconstruction finished in the reconstruction campaign of the 1960s.

Why a 1960s building was registered

Registration under the 1996 system is not the same as designation. The great keep of 1854 and twenty other original structures at Matsuyama Castle are designated Important Cultural Properties, a stricter category. Matsuyama Castle Small Tower Keep belongs instead to the register, which recognises buildings roughly fifty years old or more that contribute to the historic landscape of the country.

The reason this particular reconstruction qualifies lies in the paperwork behind it. After the arson of 1933, the Ministry of Education was asked to prepare full working drawings for the nine lost buildings, and it did so immediately after the surviving structures were listed under the old National Treasure law in 1935. Those drawings and specifications, based on a survey of the buildings while they still stood, were what the postwar carpenters worked from. The result is a timber reconstruction that reproduces the mid-nineteenth-century building rather than approximating it.

The national database of the Agency for Cultural Affairs records the construction date as 1967. Matsuyama City gives the completion date as May 27, 1968, the day the nine rebuilt structures were handed over. Both figures refer to the same project.

What to look for

Stand below the compound on the south side and the profile of the Small Tower Keep reads clearly. The upper storey is set back slightly from the lower one, the eaves project only a little, and a chidori-hafu gable, a triangular dormer laid directly on the roof slope, breaks the south face of the first roof. The whole is roofed in Hongawarabuki, the heavy alternation of broad flat tiles and rounded cover tiles that gives castle roofs their ribbed texture.

The walls repay a closer look. The lower part of the ground floor is finished in sasarako board siding, horizontal boards held by vertical battens notched to fit them, a technique that sheds rain from the base of the wall. Above that line, and across the whole upper storey, the surface is plastered in Shikkui and carried right up over the underside of the eaves, so that no exposed timber remains for an attacker's fire arrow to catch.

On the two outward faces, east and south, look for the small hooded projections at the base of the wall. These are stone-drop openings, hatches through which defenders could fire straight down at anyone who had reached the foot of the masonry. Their placement on the outer faces only is a good illustration of how the compound was meant to work: the courtyard side needed no such defence.

For the view from outside, the Ninomaru Historic Garden at the foot of the hill offers the standard composition. Looking up from there, the leftmost of the three buildings on the skyline is Matsuyama Castle Small Tower Keep.

Visiting

The interior is open. The Small Tower Keep sits on the ticketed circuit through the keep compound, and visitors pass through it as part of the standard route. Hours are 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., extended to 5:30 p.m. in August and shortened to 4:30 p.m. in December and January. The last admission is 30 minutes before closing, and the site closes on the third Wednesday of December. Admission to the keep compound is 520 yen for adults and 160 yen for elementary school pupils. The Honmaru courtyard outside the compound is free.

Getting there takes some planning. From Okaido tram stop, reached in about 10 minutes by Iyotetsu tram from Matsuyama City Station or JR Matsuyama Station, it is a 5 minute walk to the Shinonome-guchi ropeway station. The ropeway and the parallel single chair lift both cost 520 yen return for adults and 260 yen for children, and from the upper station at Chojagadaira it is a further 10 minute walk uphill to the ticket office. Allow about 90 minutes for the whole visit. Walking up instead takes roughly 30 minutes from the same point.

Photography for personal use is unrestricted inside and out. Live streaming, drones and large equipment are not permitted, and commercial shoots require prior application to the Matsuyama Castle office. There is no lift and no toilet inside the keep compound, and the staircases are steep.