Tsukiage-mado

What a tsukiage-mado is

A tsukiage-mado is a window hinged along its top edge and pushed open from below. Once open the shutter itself acts as a hood, keeping rain out while giving a view and a line of fire.

Castle turrets use them. The drum gate at Matsuyama Castle in Ehime Prefecture, reconstructed in 1972 and recorded as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, is described by the city of Matsuyama as having an east wall facing the attack built as a Taikokabe against arrows and shot, fitted with a pair of these windows, together with Sama for both bow and gun, and a slit cut in the floor directly above the gate doors for striking anyone who reached them. The west wall behind carries a matching pair.

The description places the windows within the defensive arrangement alongside the loopholes. Where a loophole is a small fixed opening, this window is a large one that opens, and its work is observation.

The same page notes that the interior has no ceiling, leaving the roof frame, rafters and boarding exposed, which with the fighting arrangements conveys the character of a military building. The exposed Wagoya and the opening windows belong to one composition.

How the records treat it

The term does not appear in the architectural records of the National Cultural Properties Database. The entry for the same gate says only that there are windows front and back and loopholes round the front; the type of window is not given.

Researching the term therefore means going to municipal cultural property pages or survey reports. The Matsuyama page records how many windows there are and which walls carry them, which is more than the database holds.

Houses use the same mechanism for small windows in a Tsushi-nikai or a storehouse, though the word itself appears rarely in those records. It is met most often in descriptions of castles.