Ruins only

Ruins only / 城跡

This category indicates that the castle does not have a main keep, either original or reconstructed, and has no other significant buildings to see. That does not mean they are not worth visiting. By different accounts, there existed between 3000 and 4000 castles throughout Japan in different time periods. Most of these have little if anything remaining to see, but some of them are truly gems. Some have beautiful stone walls hidden in the woods and even more have a variety of earthworks and trenches for castle fans to imagine what the castle once looked like. How did it make use of the terrain? How was it used in the network of nearby castles? Did it watch over a road or defend some valuable fields? What defensive structures can you see, either natural or man made? How could it be defended? or attacked? While it's fun to see beautiful wooden towers, I would argue that it is more fulfilling to climb a mountain while thinking about these questions in pursuit of discovering new insights about the people who built these castles.

Castles with Ruins only

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