Okayama Castle Moon Viewing Tower

The Only Turret Left Standing on the Main Bailey

Okayama Castle Tsukimi Yagura (岡山城月見櫓, also written Tsukimi-yagura, the Moon-Viewing Turret) is a corner turret at the northwest angle of the middle enclosure of the main bailey of Okayama Castle in Marunouchi, Okayama City, Okayama Prefecture, built in the 1620s and designated a national Important Cultural Property on 23 January 1933.

Okayama City's cultural properties division counts around thirty-five turrets along the castle's walls at its height. One is still there.

The rest went in two waves. Meiji-era clearance took the palaces, the gates and most of the towers; the American air raid on the night of 29 June 1945 burned the keep down to its stone base. What visitors climb today is a concrete reconstruction of 1966, refurbished in November 2022 under a programme the city called the Reiwa Great Repair. Tsukimi Yagura is original fabric, and it has been sitting on the same revetment for roughly four centuries.

Ikeda Tadakatsu ruled Okayama between 1615 and his death in 1632, and the turret rose during his widening of the middle enclosure. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the date as the span of his tenure. Okayama City narrows it to the 1620s.

Armed on One Side, Domestic on the Other

Walk around the building and it changes shape. Seen from outside the castle, on the northwest, it reads as two storeys of white plaster above a high stone base. Come round to the southeast, inside the walls, and a third level appears. Nothing has been added. The ground is not level, and the revetment lifts the outer face a full storey above the courtyard behind.

The outward side is armed, and the armament is late-model work. A semi-basement of cellar type sits beneath the first floor, hard to make out from below; the first-floor boards lift away so that defenders could pass between the two levels at will. Loopholes are cut into the stone parapet on the outer side at intervals of roughly one ken, about 1.8 metres. The first floor carries projecting latticed bay windows on the west and north, each fitted with an ishi-otoshi, a hatch for firing and for dropping stones straight down the wall face. Upstairs, the space behind the chidori-hafu (a triangular dormer gable) on the west opens as a small chamber from which the outside could be watched and shot at.

Then you turn to the castle side, and the vocabulary changes completely.

A railed veranda runs along the east and south of the upper floor, closed by rain shutters that can also be thrown wide. Behind them stand paper screens. The posts carry decorative nail covers, and the floors show traces of tatami. These are the fittings of a residential palace, not a fortress. The name of the turret is not ornamental: a lord could sit up here with the shutters open and watch the moon come up over the Asahi River.

Okayama City reads the split as a period signature. The building went up just after the Toyotomi house was destroyed at Osaka, in the years the chroniclers call Genna enbu, the laying down of arms. Military technique had never been more refined. The need for it had just fallen away.

Look at the Stonework, and Plan for November

Do not stop at the timber. The revetment carrying the turret is granite, thought to have come from Inujima, an island in the Seto Inland Sea that falls within Okayama City. The blocks are split stone laid up in the uchikomi-hagi manner. At the corner the masons switched method: long rectangular stones, finished to a high degree, alternate direction course by course in the sangi-zumi pattern, and the angle climbs in a taut curve. Along the parapet running south and east of the turret, gun ports with a semicircular hollow have been cut into dressed stone, a detail shared with Osaka Castle as rebuilt under the Tokugawa.

Seeing the exterior costs nothing. Tsukimi Yagura stands inside Ujo Park, and the middle enclosure is open ground; you can walk up to the turret and photograph it without a ticket. Admission is charged only for the keep, at 500 yen for visitors aged 15 and over, open 9:00 until 17:30 with last entry at 17:00 and closed 29 through 31 December.

The interior is a different proposition. Okayama City opens the turret once a year, timed to the Cultural Properties Protection Week promoted by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in the first week of November. Entry is free, no booking is taken, and photography is permitted. In 2025 the opening ran 1 through 3 November, 9:30 until 16:30 each day, with visitors let in as small groups to ease congestion; some two thousand people came over the three days. Dates are posted each autumn on the city and castle websites, and bad weather can cancel the event.

Reaching it is straightforward. From JR Okayama Station take the Higashiyama tram line about five minutes to Shiroshita, then walk roughly ten minutes. The turret is a short distance northwest of the keep, near the Rokamon gate.