Nagoya Castle: A Visitor's Guide to the Golden Shachihoko City Symbol

Nagoya Castle was commissioned in 1612 by Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, for his ninth son Yoshinao — part of a strategic ring of castles meant to secure the routes between Osaka and Edo (Tokyo) as the newly unified Japan settled into peace after centuries of civil war. The site put Nagoya at the center of a planned castle town, and the Owari branch of the Tokugawa family that ruled from it became one of the three most senior branches of the shogunate.

The castle's defining feature from the outset was its pair of golden shachihoko — mythical creatures with a tiger's head and a fish's body, believed in folklore to protect buildings from fire — mounted on the main keep's roof ridge. They became so closely associated with the city that a stylised shachihoko still appears on Nagoya's municipal emblem today.

In May 1945, Allied bombing raids destroyed the main keep along with most of the castle's original structures — a fate shared by a number of Japan's historic castles in the final months of the war. Only a handful of corner turrets and gates on the outer grounds survived intact, and those original structures are now designated Important Cultural Properties, distinct from the reconstructed keep itself.

The current main keep dates to 1959, rebuilt in ferroconcrete rather than traditional wood — a common postwar choice driven by cost and fire-safety codes rather than a lack of will to rebuild authentically. Inside, it now functions largely as a museum, with displays on the castle's history and Owari-era artifacts; the observation floor gives a wide view over the castle grounds and the city beyond.

Beyond the main keep, the grounds include the reconstructed Honmaru Palace, rebuilt using traditional wooden techniques and completed in 2018 after a painstaking, decades-long project — arguably a more historically faithful experience than the concrete keep itself, with elaborately painted sliding doors reproduced from surviving pre-war photographs and fragments. The surviving original structures — several corner turrets and the Ote-mon gate — are worth seeking out specifically if authentic Edo-period construction matters to you, since they're easy to walk past without realising their significance next to the much larger reconstructed keep.