Nagoya Castle: The Keep Is Closed — Here Is What You Can Still See

Nagoya Castle's main keep — the big green-roofed tower with the golden *shachihoko* fish on the ridge — closed to the public in May 2018 and has not reopened. It is structurally aged and does not meet modern seismic standards.

There is a second thing worth knowing: the tower standing there now is not the original. The castle burned in 1945 and the keep was rebuilt in 1959 in ferro-concrete, in the postwar style of a lot of Japanese castle reconstructions. What is happening now is a second reconstruction — this time in wood, using traditional methods, with completion targeted around 2032.

So if your mental image of visiting Nagoya Castle is climbing the tower for the view, adjust it. You can walk the grounds, photograph the keep from outside, and see it from every angle. You cannot go in, and you will not be able to for years.

The Honmaru Palace is the answer, and it is a better building than the concrete keep ever was.

It was the residence and audience hall of the Owari branch of the Tokugawa family, destroyed in 1945, and rebuilt over roughly a decade using only traditional materials and methods, following detailed prewar plans, photographs and surveys that had survived. It opened fully in 2018 — the same year the keep closed.

What you walk through is hinoki cypress, gold-leaf sliding screens repainted from the originals, and rooms arranged by rank so that the further in you are admitted, the more elaborate the decoration. It is loud, gold and startlingly bright, which is what these interiors actually looked like before four centuries of soot.

Because it is new, everything is crisp. Because it is a faithful reconstruction, it is not a museum display — it is the building. That combination is rare and it is why the castle is still very much worth the ticket despite the closed keep.

Only twelve castle keeps in Japan survive from the feudal era without having been destroyed and rebuilt. Nagoya's is not one of them. Inuyama Castle, about 40 minutes north of Nagoya, is.

It is small, steep and wooden, with worn stairs you climb in socks and a top-floor balcony over the Kiso River. It is a National Treasure and it is what a castle keep is actually like — cramped, dark, and built for defence rather than display. Standing in it after seeing Nagoya's concrete tower from the outside is a useful contrast.

Inuyama pairs naturally with the Nakasendo post towns further north, which is how most day trips out of Nagoya are structured. If castles are the reason you came to this region, do Nagoya's palace and Inuyama's keep, in that order.

The site is large and the ticket covers all of it. The Ninomaru Garden is a formal Edo-period garden in the second bailey, quiet and mostly ignored by visitors heading straight for the keep. The stone walls and moats are original in large stretches and worth walking the perimeter for.

Kinshachi Yokocho, a food street beside the east and west gates, does Nagoya's specialities — *miso katsu*, *hitsumabushi* grilled eel, *tebasaki* wings — in a compact row. It is aimed at visitors but the food is genuinely local rather than generic.

Allow about two hours for the palace, garden and grounds. Cherry blossom in early April and autumn colour in late November are the two windows when the grounds themselves become the attraction.