Rock-hard puzzle for castle enthusiast
A passion for majestic buildings leads an aficionado to help with reconstruction of Japanese landmark
Describing himself as a “castle nut”, 30-yearold Wang Yingjun dreamed of building a castle when he was just 5. His father told him, “You can build one when you grow up,” he recalled.
Instead of fulfilling his childhood fantasy in China, Wang made his dream come true in Japan when he was in his late 20s. However, he did not lay the bricks for a turreted fortress from the ground up. Instead he joined a group of people to complete what could be described as the world’s hardest jigsaw puzzle.
Sounding as ludicrous as it appears, Wang works with hundreds of thousands of salvaged rocks. Each has a number marked with chalk and is carefully arranged in a checkerboard pattern across a football field-sized stretch of open ground. He and his fellow volunteers are to decide the correct position of each rock so that they can eventually be placed back into one of the three premier castles in Japan: Kumamoto.
With a history dating back to 1467, the castle was gradually expanded over the years into a complex including 49 turrets, 18 turret gates and 29 smaller gates. It measures roughly 1.6 kilometers from east to west and 1.2 km from north to south.
Located in a downtown park in the quiet city of Kumamoto on the southwestern island of Kyushu, Japan, the castle has been destroyed several times by war and natural disasters. The latest of these was a magnitude 6.5 earthquake followed by a magnitude 7.3 quake two days later in 2016.
More than 43,000 houses in Kumamoto and other prefectures were damaged by the earthquakes, with 50 people losing their lives and some 47,000 people forced to take refuge in makeshift homes. As of March this year, 95 people were still living in temporary homes, according to local authorities.
The quakes also rocked the 500-year-old castle, causing roof tiles and decorative ornaments to fall off. Its stone walls crumbled or completely collapsed. While the castle had withstood many earthquakes in the past with minor structural damage, it was soon discovered that two of the castle’s keeps had partially collapsed.
At the time, the Kumamoto municipal government said it would take the best part of 20 years to restore the whole castle complex. However, in June 2021, the main tower of Kumamoto Castle reopened.
The main tower now serves as an exhibition center to provide information on the extensive quake damage and its repair work. The top floor of the six-story tower offers a view of the entire park and the land where Wang’s ‘jigsaw puzzle’ is progressing.
“Some may consider it a bamboozling job,” said Wang, referring to the complicated process of putting the stones back together with accuracy and repairing the wraparound walls, “but I was besotted. There is an emotional tie to this functional beauty made by wood and stone. It is like fate, and I like that.”
Moving to Japan in 2002 as an elementary school student, Wang recalled the first castle he visited there and fell in love with. His father had taken him on a series of driving trips around the coast and into the
forested interior of Hyogo Prefecture when, suddenly, a pure white castle appeared on the mountaintop in front of them.
“It was a kind of architecture with aspects I had never seen before,” said Wang. “Its size and scale blew me away. The huge walls gave no indication of what you would find inside. Every part of it was designed to reveal itself in stages. It was like unwrapping a treasure map.”
Wang was talking about Himeji, another of the three premier castles of Japan.
Nicknamed “Castle of the White Heron”, Himeji Castle became Japan’s first-ever UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993 due to its largely intact condition. With origins dating back to 1333, the castle had survived multiple disasters and atrocities throughout its 700-year history, including World War II and the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake.
Himeji Castle, together with its host city, appears modest compared to the metropolises of Osaka and Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, the latter being less than an hour’s train ride
away. But when it comes to history, its rise and fall through the centuries and its stories and legends, Himeji is anything but inferior.
It is said that there used to be more than 20,000 castles in Japan and most of these were built during the country’s Warring States Period (1467-1568) when regional Samurai lords fought each other for power. The castles were built for two main purposes: to guard strategic sites such as ports, river crossings or crossroads; and to display a Samurai lord’s power and wealth.
In its military function, the castle and the grounds were fortified with myriad defenses and the main keep of the castle was used to store food and weapons in case of a prolonged battle.
Being on a mountaintop, Himeji Castle is an ideal place for both functions and thus, it was set in every lord’s heart. In 1580, Yoshitaka Kuroda, then owner of the castle, presented it to Hideyoshi Toyotomi, the second “Great Unifier” of Japan.
Following the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, during which Toyotomi’s loyalist clans were defeated by Ieyasu Tokugawa, founder of the Edo period which ruled Japan from 1603 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Himeji Castle was rewarded to Tokugawa’s son-in-law, Terumasa Ikeda. Ikeda completely rebuilt and expanded the castle between 1601 and 1609, transforming it into the complex seen today. It makes Himeji Castle one of only 12 castles nationally to retain their original central keeps from the Edo period or earlier.
UNESCO’s World Heritage List calls Himeji Castle “the finest surviving example of early 17th-century Japanese castle architecture” and “a masterpiece of construction in wood, combining function with aesthetic appeal”.
Besides the untouched nature and majestic build, there is a ghost story dating back to the 16th century that took place in Himeji Castle. The 2002 blockbuster horror movie The Ring was based on it.
The story goes like this: lord of Himeji Castle, Tessan Aoyama, fell in love with his servant girl Okiku. He offered to leave his wife for her but she refused his advances.
One of Okiku’s duties was to look after 10 valuable golden plates owned by Aoyama. One day, he hid one of them.
He told Okiku that if she did not agree to be with him, he would blame her for stealing the plate and she would be tortured and executed.
Rejecting the lord again, Okiku was then hung above a well where Aoyama tortured her by dipping her head first into the water and beating her when she came up. In the end, Okiku collapsed and died. This is where the spooky story begins.
Locals said Okiku would crawl out of the well on a nightly basis and haunt the castle, counting the plates and throwing a violent screaming fit when she found the 10th was missing. The sound eventually drove Aoyama mad. The well, known as Okiku’s Well, can be found outside Himeji Castle — sealed with wrought-iron bars.
The final of the three premier castles is Matsumoto.
Unlike most others, Matsumoto Castle is a flatland castle built on a plain within easy reach of Tokyo. With no hilltop or rivers to use as defenses, Matsumoto Castle has an extensive system of interconnecting walls, moats and gatehouses.
Because of its black exterior, it is also known as the “Crow Castle”.
In the winter over 2021-22, Crow Castle received some dazzling doses of nighttime color. In a public art project, the castle was used as a canvas for a laser mapping light display. Colorful illuminations lit up the castle, creating an amazing mirror effect.
“The Crow Castle had been a spectacular place to look at from every angle, but now at night may be the best way to imbibe its magic, in the full glow of the laser lights,” said one comment on Twitter about the event.