Makabe Castle Ruins

Makabe Castle Ruins: A Medieval Stronghold in the Foothills of Tsukuba

The grass-covered earthen banks that ripple across 12.5 hectares of farmland in Sakuragawa City do not look much like a castle at first glance. There is no donjon, no whitewashed wall, no stone keep. Yet what survives at Makabe-jō Ato (真壁城跡) is more uncommon than most postcard castles in Japan: four concentric moats, deliberately bent earthwork ramparts, and the buried layers of a fortress occupied without interruption from the late twelfth century until 1628. The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the site a National Historic Site on October 28, 1994, recognising it as one of the finest surviving medieval lowland castles in northern Kantō.

The castle sat in the western foothills of Mount Ashio, part of the Tsukuba range, on a low rise overlooking the floodplain of the Sakura River. That position was not picked for the view. It allowed the Makabe lords to dominate the road between the Kantō plain and the temple towns clustered around Mount Tsukuba, while the wetlands to the south and west served as a natural moat. Today the same terrain explains why so much of the earthwork has survived: the soft soil that once made the bastion difficult to assault also made it inconvenient to redevelop.

Four Centuries of the Makabe Clan

The lineage that gave the castle its name traces back to the Bandō Heishi, the eastern branch of the Taira clan founded by Taira no Kunika in the early tenth century. In 1172, Taira no Takemoto—better known as Makabe Takemoto (真壁長幹), fourth son of Taki Naomoto of the Daijō clan—was appointed district magistrate of Makabe and took the place name as his own. Local tradition holds that he raised the first fortified residence on this site at the same time, though the earthworks visible today are the result of repeated rebuilding over the next four centuries.

The Makabe first appear by name in surviving central records during the Northern and Southern Courts period. A document from the twelfth month of Kōkoku 2 (1341) lists Makabe Castle among the strongholds held by allies of the imperial loyalist Kitabatake Chikafusa. Eight decades later, in Ōei 30 (1423), the clan had aligned itself with the Muromachi shogunate as one of the Kyōto Fuchishū, provincial warriors under direct shogunal patronage, and on the second day of the eighth month of that year, the castle was attacked by forces loyal to the Kamakura kubō. The fighting did not dislodge the Makabe, who would continue to hold the district through a long chain of alliances and reversals with the Koga kubō, the Oda clan, and others.

The clan reached its widest fame in the late sixteenth century under Makabe Hisamoto and his son Ujimoto, the latter remembered as Oni-Makabe, "the Demon of Makabe," for his preference for a long oak war-club bound with iron studs. When the Later Hōjō fell in 1590 and Toyotomi Hideyoshi redistributed the east, the Makabe came under the Satake clan, who had been made overlords of all Hitachi Province. The Satake transfer to Dewa in 1602 ended the family's 430-year tenure in Makabe; most of the clan followed their new lords to what is now Akita, while many retainers stayed behind and helped shape the merchant town that grew up west of the castle.

The castle itself outlived its founding clan by only a generation. In 1606, Asano Nagamasa accepted Makabe and Tsukuba districts as a 50,000-koku retirement fief and chose this castle as his residence. After his son moved the family seat to Kasama, Inaba Masakatsu, the son of the famous Edo court attendant Kasuga no Tsubone, entered with a 10,000-koku holding in 1624. When Inaba was transferred to Mōka four years later, in Kan'ei 5 (1628), Makabe Castle was decommissioned and its buildings dismantled. The defences were left to settle into the fields.

Why the Site Was Designated a National Historic Site

What makes Makabe Castle remarkable is not what was lost but what remains underneath. The four concentric moats around the Honmaru and Ninomaru are still legible on the ground, as are the linear moats and earthworks of the Nakajō and Seto baileys to the east. Even more striking, the eastern baileys retain the deliberate kinks known as ori (折)—right-angle bends built into the ramparts so that any attacker pressing along the outer wall would be exposed to flanking fire from a parallel earthwork. This is a defensive logic that became essential after matchlock firearms entered eastern Japan in the mid-sixteenth century, and Makabe is one of the clearer surviving examples of the technique in the Kantō region.

The 1981 excavation of the Honmaru revealed an earlier moat running north–south through the middle of the bailey: roughly seven metres deep and more than ten metres wide, since filled. The same dig recovered kawarake earthenware dishes, cooking pots, Chinese celadon and white porcelain, ash-glazed wares, arrowheads, and matchlock bullets, spanning the entire period of occupation from the medieval to the early Edo periods. Together with the standing earthworks, this stratified evidence allows archaeologists to trace how the same patch of ground was reshaped, expanded, and re-fortified across roughly four hundred and fifty years. That continuity, on a scale of 12.5 hectares, is unusual enough to have justified national designation.

What to Look For When You Visit

The site is open as a free public park, and the best way through it is on foot. Climbing onto the outer earthworks is permitted and rewarding: from above, the geometry of the four moats becomes obvious in a way that is hard to grasp at ground level. Look first for the Honmaru, at roughly 47 metres above sea level and measuring about 100 metres north to south and 80 to 100 metres east to west. The main municipal gymnasium now sits on this central bailey, which is the one part of the castle that has been substantially altered, a reminder that preservation here has been negotiated rather than absolute.

The Inari shrine on the northern earthwork of the Honmaru is original to the castle's later use and is still maintained. Walking east, the visitor passes from the concentric world of the inner baileys into the harder, more angular geometry of the Nakajō and Seto baileys. The passageways linking these enclosures sit exactly at the ori bends, so that anyone entering would have been observed and, in wartime, shot at from above. A small Kashima shrine still occupies the Seto bailey as the castle's tutelary deity. Sections of earthwork and palisade have been reconstructed by the city's cultural properties division, and signage marks the major features.

Two former gates, of the yakui-mon physician's-gate type, are said to have been moved out of the castle when it was decommissioned. They now stand at private residences and a temple gate elsewhere in the area, though the attributions rest on local tradition rather than documentary proof. Local guides at the Makabe Denshōkan history museum can point visitors toward them for anyone curious enough to track them down.

Around Makabe: A Town Built on the Castle's Foundations

Less than a kilometre west of the castle lies one of the most distinctive historic streetscapes in northern Kantō. The Makabe Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings, designated in 2010, preserves a townscape that took shape as the castle's service town in the late sixteenth century and grew into a regional centre for cotton trade and stonework after the castle was abandoned. The blocks of warehouses, latticed merchant houses, and freestanding gateways—many of them yakui-mon—make a natural complement to a visit to the ruins.

The Makabe Denshōkan, a short walk from the castle site, exhibits artefacts excavated from the bailey and offers context for both the castle and the town. Stone-carving workshops on the main streets continue a craft that has been practised here since the medieval period; the local granite was used in everything from gate posts to the gravestones of the Makabe lords themselves, which can still be visited at Henjō-in temple. Visitors with extra time can climb Mount Tsukuba, twenty minutes' drive to the south, or follow the cherry-lined banks of the Sakura River that gives the city its name.