Fukuyama Castle (Matsumae Castle) Honmaru Gate

The Only Surviving Structure of Japan's Northernmost Castle

The Honmaru Gate of Fukuyama Castle, also known as Matsumae Castle (福山城（松前城）本丸御門, Fukuyamajō / Matsumaejō Honmaru Gomon), is a late Edo period turret gate in Matsushiro, Matsumae Town, Hokkaido, dated to Kaei 6 (1853) and designated on 8 May 1941 under the old National Treasure Preservation Law, becoming an Important Cultural Property on 29 August 1950. It is the sole original building left from the last castle built in the Japanese style, and the northernmost of its kind.

The castle behind it was not built for domestic warfare. Foreign ships were appearing off the Tsugaru Strait, and in 1849 the shogunate ordered the seventeenth lord of Matsumae, Takahiro, to fortify the coast, raising him to the rank of castle-holding daimyo in the process. Construction began in 1850 and finished in 1854. The design came from Ichigaku Ichikawa, a military scholar of the Takasaki domain, who argued that Fukuyama was the wrong site on defensive grounds and proposed building inland behind Hakodate instead. The retainers did not want to move, so the existing Fukuyama residence was enlarged into a castle where it already stood.

What Ichikawa produced was an odd hybrid. A three-storey keep stood on the main enceinte, three two-storey turrets on the second, and seven gun batteries were set out on the third enceinte facing the sea. Traditional castle architecture and coastal artillery were combined in a single plan, which is what makes Matsumae unlike any castle further south.

How the Gate Came to Stand Alone

By 1875 the Kaitakushi, the Hokkaido development commission, had ordered most of the castle demolished. Three things were spared: the three-storey keep, the Honmaru Gate and the east wall, and all three were designated National Treasures in 1941.

On 5 June 1949 a fire at the town office threw sparks onto the castle grounds. The keep and the east wall burned. The Honmaru Gate, also called the Ōtemon or main gate, was the only structure to come through, and it was designated an Important Cultural Property the following year, on 29 August 1950. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database records the designation date as 8 May 1941, reflecting the original National Treasure listing rather than the postwar re-designation; both dates are correct within their own legal framework.

A reconstructed keep in reinforced concrete, designed by Professor Minoru Ōoka of Yokohama National University, was completed in 1960 after a fundraising campaign that ran across Hokkaido. Ancillary facilities followed the next year, and the interior became the Matsumae Castle Museum. Visitors sometimes assume the whole complex is a replica; the gate they walk through to reach it is not.

Reading the Gate Itself

The structure is a yaguramon, a gate with a turret built over the passage, in sankengen ichiko ryōwakido-tsuki form: a three-bay frontage with a single central opening and small side doors flanking it. The roof is gabled and sheeted in copper. It faces south, with a wall running east from it towards the site of the three-storey keep.

Look down before you look up. The stonework is dressed tuff, cut square and set so tightly that the joints run almost without gaps, a level of finish that repays a close look at the base of the gate on either side of the opening. Above it, the turret is plain. There is no ornament to speak of, which is consistent with a structure built under shogunal order for coastal defence in the 1850s rather than as a display of a lord's standing.

The gate sits inside Matsumae Park and stands in the open, so it can be seen at any hour and there is no charge to look at it or walk through it. Entering the reconstructed keep is separate. The Matsumae Castle Museum opens from 10 April to 10 December, 9:00 to 17:00, with last admission at 16:30, and closes for winter from 11 December to 9 April. Admission is 360 yen for adults from high school age and 240 yen for elementary and junior high school students, with group rates from ten people. A combined ticket with the Matsumae Han Yashiki historical village costs 620 yen and 420 yen respectively; preschool children enter free.

Most visitors come in spring. Matsumae Park holds around 250 varieties of cherry across roughly ten thousand trees, listed among Japan's hundred best cherry blossom sites, and because early, mid and late flowering types were planted deliberately the season stretches across about a month from late April. A dedicated cherry reference garden, opened in 1965, gathers varieties for study in one place. Coming in that window means the gate is busy; coming in October means having the stonework to yourself with the strait behind it.

Buses reach the Matsushiro stop, about ten minutes on foot from the castle. By car it is roughly eighty minutes from JR Kikonai Station, and the town provides free parking for around forty vehicles in the Teramachi area of Matsumae Park, five minutes' walk from the museum. The surface there is unpaved.