View from Gifu Castle

The highest point in my city is Mt. Kinka, elevation 329 meters. At its top sits tiny Gifu Castle, a 1950s reconstruction of the 16th century original, once a residence of famous feudal lord Nobunaga Oda. A castle of some sort has sat atop Mt. Kinka since at least the 12th century, and from almost anywhere in the city, you can see it.

It's wonderful to have a castle in my city -- by day, no matter how many wrong turns I take, it always points my way back downtown, and by night, when dark Mt. Kinka itself melts into the nightsky background, the floodlit castle seems to hover whimsically above the city. A lot of the castle's likeability though is that I know these days it's inhabited only by a friendly elderly tour guide or two and the nice old woman who sits in the ticket booth and gives me free postcards, rather than say, a powerful warmongering god-like feudal lord and the soldiers who protect him with their lives.

Hundreds of years ago, the ancestors of my neighbors lived their lives at the foot and mercy of this mountaintop castle. Not only could they see the castle everywhere they went, especially in the absence of skyscrapers and pachinko parlor lights, but surely they must have felt that it could see them too. Some days I feel that myself, and even knowing it's only those old tour guides and the postcard lady up there, it gives me pause. When I'm running late to work, I'll swear it stares down at me reproachfully in my car. Everywhere I go, that castle can see me. Imagine if the White House, FBI headquarters, and Pentagon were all built at the top of some high hill in the center of your town; I wonder if that's what it felt like.

Comments

[Karla]

Gifu is roughly 260,000 people. Not small exactly, but it's got far more urban sprawl to it than a lot of Japanese cities. I actually live on the outskirts of Gifu, in one of those odd little places that is always self-incorporating and rejoining and regrouping, and whose residents are sometimes unsure of exactly where they DO live. Population density feels like it works differently here than in the States -- about a quarter of the population lives in Tokyo, and a large percentage of the remainder of that somewhere like Osaka/Kyoto or Fukuoka, so any place other than those major cities can possibly feel pretty downright rural, with all the expected conservatisms and strong local flavors. It may not be a small city, but it's smalltown, if that makes any sense. The castle is more or less downtown too, the little dense sprinkling of lights you see below the castle is misleading -- beyond that is an awful lot of fields and hills and orchards and dark old neighborhoods. Maybe if you lifted UT out of Austin, and the Capitol, definitely 6th Street, and probably Dell too, maybe it'd be about like that.

The castle renovation seems to be complete, I'm not sure when that site I linked to was written. The inside is very modern, with no hints as to its past interior whatsoever, just lots of framed pictures and samurai relics in glass cases, but no signs of intended further construction.

[sean]

Gifu doesn't look to be as small a city as I imagined it to be from your stories. I read that the castle is being renovated, had the work been completed by the time you visited?

Also, that's a wonderful observation about the castle's role in the life of the town and it's people.