Matsuyama Castle South Corner Turret

The turret with a balcony

Matsuyama Castle South Corner Turret (松山城南隅櫓, Minami Sumi Yagura) is a two-storied wooden turret at the southwest 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.

Castle records also call it Saru-Tori Kotenshu, the Monkey and Rooster Small Keep, after the compass directions of the old zodiac reckoning. The name signals its status. In the ring of buildings that makes up the keep compound, the two corner turrets rank immediately below the small keep, and both are treated in the documents as keeps in their own right rather than as ordinary turrets.

The present structure dates from the reconstruction campaign of the 1960s. Its predecessor, completed with the rest of the compound in 1854, burned in the arson of 1933 along with the small keep, the north corner turret, the Tamon Turret and the Ten-Bay Corridor. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the construction year as 1967; Matsuyama City dates the handover of the nine rebuilt structures to May 27, 1968.

Why it carries the register mark rather than a designation

Twenty-one structures at Matsuyama Castle, headed by the great keep, are designated Important Cultural Properties under a listing that goes back to 1935. Matsuyama Castle South Corner Turret is not among them, because the building standing on that corner today is sixty years old rather than a hundred and seventy. It belongs instead to the register created in 1996, which covers structures that contribute to the historic landscape of the country.

The judgment rests on how the rebuilding was done. Working drawings for all nine lost buildings had been prepared by the Ministry of Education immediately after the 1935 listing, from a survey made while the originals still stood. The postwar reconstruction followed those drawings and specifications in timber, with the same plastered and boarded finishes, so the profile that closes the southwest corner of the compound is the profile of the mid-nineteenth century building.

What to look for

One feature separates this turret from its mirror image at the north corner. A Kōran, a wooden railing, runs around the upper storey, giving the building a narrow gallery that none of the other corner structures has. Seen from the courtyard side, that railing is the quickest way to tell the two corner turrets apart.

The floor area is 64 square metres, identical to the north turret, and the two were built to match: same size, same form, same finishes, placed symmetrically so that the west face of the compound reads as a balanced composition. A Chidori-hafu dormer sits on the west slope of the lower roof. The ground floor wall is boarded below with vertical battens over horizontal planks, and everything above is plastered in Shikkui up to and across the underside of the eaves.

At the base of the two outward faces, hooded stone-drop hatches are set at each corner of the lower storey. Combined with the railed gallery above, they show the building doing two jobs at once, watching the western approach from the Inui gate side and covering the foot of the wall.

The best exterior view is from the west, on the path between the Shichiku Gate and the compound, where the north turret, the Ten-Bay Corridor and the South Corner Turret line up in profile against the sky.

Visiting

The interior is part of the ticketed circuit through the keep compound and can be walked through. Opening hours are 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with 5:30 p.m. closing in August and 4:30 p.m. in December and January; the last admission is 30 minutes earlier, and the compound is closed on the third Wednesday of December. Admission is 520 yen for adults and 160 yen for elementary school pupils. Standing outside the turret in the Honmaru courtyard costs nothing.

To reach the hilltop, take the Iyotetsu tram to Okaido, about 10 minutes from Matsuyama City Station or JR Matsuyama Station, then walk 5 minutes to the Shinonome-guchi station of the ropeway. Ropeway and chair lift share a ticket at 520 yen return for adults and 260 yen for children. From the upper station it is a 10 minute climb on foot to the ticket office. Walking the whole way from Shinonome-guchi takes about 30 minutes.

Personal photography is unrestricted. Live streaming, drone flights and large equipment are prohibited, and commercial filming needs advance permission from the castle office. The stairs inside the compound are steep and there is no lift.