Okayama Castle West Bailey West Watchtower

A Fortress Turret Stranded in a Schoolyard

Okayama Castle Nishinomaru Nishite Yagura (岡山城西丸西手櫓, also written Nishi-no-maru Nishite-yagura, the West Turret of the West Bailey) is a two-storey corner turret in Marunouchi, Okayama City, Okayama Prefecture, dated by the Agency for Cultural Affairs to the Momoyama period and designated a national Important Cultural Property on 23 January 1933. Locally it is usually shortened to Nishite Yagura.

Two turrets came through the twentieth century at Okayama Castle. Tsukimi Yagura, the elegant one, sits inside the park beside the reconstructed keep and gets the visitors. This is the other one, and it is the older, plainer, more warlike of the pair.

Its date is not fully settled. The Agency for Cultural Affairs building record assigns the work to 1594 through 1597, the years in which Ukita Hideie was bringing the castle to completion. Okayama City's cultural properties division reads the evidence differently. The west bailey, it says, was laid out in 1603, when the boy Ikeda Tadatsugu was installed as lord of Okayama and his elder brother Ikeda Toshitaka entered the castle in his stead, and the turret is thought to have been raised as part of that work. The historic-site record for Okayama Castle likewise credits the rebuilding of the west bailey to Tadatsugu's arrival in 1603. Either reading puts the building within a decade of the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, and both make it older than Tsukimi Yagura.

Small Openings, Thick Intentions

The plan is a plain rectangle: five bays east to west, about 10.4 metres, and three bays north to south, about 7.3 metres, rising 10.6 metres to the ridge. There is no set-back at the upper floor. The walls simply go straight up, which gives the turret a squat, braced look quite unlike the tapering silhouette of a keep.

Everything about the exterior is coated in white lime plaster, worked in right under the eaves so that no timber shows on the outer face. The topmost roof is irimoya, hipped and gabled. On the lower west face a curved kara-hafu gable breaks the line. A pair of shachihoko ride the main ridge, and demon tiles scattered across the roof carry the swallowtail butterfly, the crest of the Ikeda house.

Okayama City describes the design as combat architecture suited to the years right after Sekigahara: keep the openings as small as you can, and make each one count. On the west wall of the first floor two ishi-otoshi project from the plaster, boxes that look like shelves from inside and open downward as firing hatches, with two latticed windows set between them. The second floor carries heavy latticed bay windows on the west, south and north to hold the field of view. Inside, the ground floor is a doma, a beaten earth floor, with no ceiling boards at all; the beams are left exposed. On the upper floor the west, south and north sides are boarded corridors, laid out so defenders could move quickly between the windows.

The room on the east of the upper floor breaks the pattern completely. It has the marks of tatami, an alcove and a built-in cupboard, wide windows with paper screens and rain shutters. Okayama City reads this as later remodelling, carried out once the turret was drawn into everyday use alongside the mansion that occupied the rest of the bailey.

What Was Below, and What Is There Now

The turret guarded the western edge of the castle's core. What lies beneath it today is city blocks and a tram line; what lay beneath it then was open water, the moat running along the west face. Anyone standing at those first-floor hatches was looking straight down onto it.

The bailey behind was not a military space for long. A large mansion filled it, and Ikeda Mitsumasa moved in on his retirement in 1672. Retired lords and members of the lord's family lived there through the Edo period. A pond survives east of the turret, thought to be what is left of the mansion garden.

Seeing the building takes a little planning. The whole site became the grounds of Uchisange Elementary School, which opened in 1887 and closed in 2001, and the perimeter still carries the tall coursed-rubble revetments of the west bailey. The gate is normally shut and the grounds are not open for casual visits, so in practice you view the turret from outside. The west elevation is the one to aim for: a building that used to block the view along the tram street has been cleared, and the plastered west wall with its lattice windows now reads clearly from the pavement. Get off at Shiroshita, one stop and about five minutes by tram from JR Okayama Station. Tsukimi Yagura and the keep are a ten-minute walk east from the same stop, so the two Important Cultural Properties fit comfortably into one afternoon.

There is no regular interior opening programme here of the kind Okayama City runs at Tsukimi Yagura each November. Anyone hoping to get inside should contact the city's cultural properties division before travelling.