Japanese Castles from the Shinkansen

Somewhere between the cities, a white tower rises above the rooftops beyond the bullet train window, holds for a few seconds, and is gone. That is a castle. The part you see is the keep, called tenshu: a wooden tower on a high, curving base of fitted stone, once ringed by moats, gates and lesser turrets. It was not a stone house to live in, as in Europe, but the seat of a daimyo, the lord who governed the province around it, with a town grown up below its walls.

Castles were placed where people and goods already moved: post towns on the old highways, the fords and ferries of the big rivers, hills with a view across the plain. The road between Edo, now Tokyo, and Kyoto or Osaka was the one the shogunate watched most closely, and castles stand along it one after another.

The railways built from the 1870s on chose the same ground for the same reasons: easy gradients, the simplest river crossings, and the towns where people already were. Those castle towns became the station cities, and the Tokaido Shinkansen runs along much the same corridor as the old highway. The castles at the window are not a coincidence.

The tower itself is often not the old one. Many keeps were dismantled after 1873, when the new government ordered most castles abandoned, and others burned in the air raids of 1945; concrete reconstructions followed in the postwar decades. The stone bases beneath them are usually original, and where no tower was rebuilt, what remains is the shape of the hill and its walls.

From the train each castle lasts between a few seconds and a dozen. One stands right beside the track, another is a speck on a distant summit. Knowing which side of the carriage to watch is most of the work.