Okayama-jō 岡山城 Castle is situated in the middle of Okayama City, about three hours west of Tōkyō 東京 and one hour west of Kyōto 京都. Originally built at the very end of the 16th century, a few years before the start of the Edo-jidai 江戸時代 period, it was destroyed -- like so many other castles in Japan -- by bombing during World War II and rebuilt in the 1960s. Cloaked in panels of black wood, it is commonly known as U-jō烏城 "Crow Castle" or Kin-u-jō金烏城 "Golden Crow Castle" in contrast to two other famous Japanese castles: Matsumoto-jō (Karasu-jō 烏城 "Crow Castle:" the Chinese character is the same but the pronunciation is different) in Nagano prefecture, and Himeji-jō (Shirasagi-jō or Hakuro-jō 白鷺城 "White Egret Castle") in Hyōgo prefecture.
Okayama 岡山 is a nice place to visit: the city is located on the coast of the Seto-naikai 瀬戸内海 Inland Sea, just opposite the island of Shikoku 四国, and the rest of the prefecture, stretching north up to the very backbone of Honshu 本州, is full of hills and mountains (oka-yama literally means "hill-mountain" in Japanese), castles, picturesque rice paddy terraces and woodland. Like many other castles in Japan, Okayama-jō is surrounded by parkland and attached to a famous garden, Kōraku-en 後楽園. Kōraku-en is actually one of the three most famous gardens in Japan, the Nihon Sanmei-en 日本三名園, started at the beginning of the seventeeth century by the Lord of Okayama, Ikeda Tsunamasa 池田綱政. I spent a number of years coming to Okayama on an annual basis and while I didn't stay in Okayama City, I did always enjoying stopping off there to visit, and I would recommend you do the same if you are ever lucky enough to be in the region: I guarantee you don't have to be a former art history student to appreciate it!
One of the interesting things about the architecture of Japanese castles (and most of Japanese art and architecture in general) is that they share a common vocabulary, faithfully reproducing a number of set visual elements, all with a specific meaning. One such common element is the shachi 鯱: a mythical being, half carp and half tiger, said to have the power to control rainfall. Because Japanese castles were made of wood (built upon a stone base), they were very susceptible to fire, and so shachi were soon adopted as guardian creatures, their highly decorated forms incorporated into the roof structure in a suitably high position.
One more common and immediately recognisable element in the Japanese visual vocabulary is the yatsu-hashi 八つ橋 eight-fold wooden foot-bridge. Appearing on folding screens, fans, writing boxes and many other art objects, the yats-hashi is a direct reference to a poem in the Ise Monogatari 伊勢物語, a famous Heian-jidai 平安時代 period (794-1185) work of literature, in which a lost court noble besides an eigh-tfold bridge over a marsh of irises and composes lonely poems.
You can read my other articles on Japanese castles here: Bitchu-Matsuyama-jo Castle, Bitchu-Takahashi, Japan and here: Matsuyama-jō Castle, Takamatsu, Japan.
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This is 2 minutes away from my house. :)
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Man I really love your way of blogging. Are you actually Japanese, or are you living there as an expatriate? Japan has always been a place I wanted to travel too, yet it is on the other side of the globe... Really really far away!
Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for the really cool comment! No, not Japanese (although I use a Japanese surname), just been studying the language and culture for over twenty years now...
Lovely photos. Really enjoying your posts from Japan. I've also been posting about Japan so we have that in common :) Keep up the good work
Hi! Just been checking out your blog: you've got some really good stuff going on there! Too bad I didn't see you earlier and upvote some of those posts... Are you still in Japan, or coming back any time soon?
Hey. Yeah, no problem. I will post more soon. I'm back in May time for work, maybe only 2-3 weeks, then probably back at the end of the year sometime.
First city I stayed at in Japan in 2010. Heat was already brutal and it was only May. Will never forget waking around that tea garden/this castle.
The girl I almost married lived nearby. I always visited the castle when I was staying with her. Hard to forget, too. Now, I sometimes wonder whether I might not bump into Corbett there!