Nijo Castle

Nijo Castle occupies a walled rectangle of about 500 by 400 m in the heart of Kyoto, surrounded by a moat and stone walls. Unlike the mountain fortresses of the Warring States period, it was built less for defence than as a stage for power: the residence where the Tokugawa shoguns stayed when visiting the capital and received the court and the feudal lords.

The centrepiece is the Ninomaru Palace, a chain of six connected buildings arranged diagonally, whose rooms grow more formal and more lavishly decorated the further one goes inside. Their sliding doors and walls carry several thousand paintings, largely by artists of the Kano school under Kano Tan'yū, with tigers, pines, cranes and seasonal scenes on gold ground. The corridors' floorboards squeak like birdsong when walked on, which gave them the name nightingale floors (uguisubari).

The inner Honmaru enclosure holds a later palace: a princely residence moved here from the Kyoto Imperial Palace grounds in 1893–1894. The main keep, destroyed by lightning in 1750, was never rebuilt; its stone base serves as a viewpoint.

Tokugawa Ieyasu had Nijo Castle built after his victory at Sekigahara and received his appointment as shogun in 1603 here. His grandson Iemitsu enlarged the castle in 1624–1626 for a visit by Emperor Go-Mizunoo, when most of the present buildings took shape. For more than two centuries afterwards the shoguns rarely came to Kyoto. In 1867 the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, announced the return of political power to the emperor in the Ninomaru Palace, ending the Tokugawa shogunate. The castle then served as an imperial detached palace until it was given to the city of Kyoto.

Nijo Castle frames the Tokugawa age: Ieyasu marked the beginning of the shogunate here in 1603, and Yoshinobu its end in 1867. Its palace was designed to impress visitors with a precise hierarchy of spaces, in which the rank of a guest determined how far into the building he was admitted and which paintings he saw.

The gardens are planted with several hundred cherry trees of many varieties, and the castle is a popular spot for cherry blossom viewing and evening illuminations. Its Kano paintings are among the most important ensembles of early Edo-period decorative art.