The city features a tram, which courses through-out the city. It had rails and everything. It was pretty cool. We bought passes for the tram at the station. We planned to use the tram a lot.
Moats!
While the city of Kumamoto wasn't quite as quaintly quaint as the quite quaint village of Matsumoto, the castle and fortifications were magnificent. Our plan was to stop at Kumamoto Castle to let Locutus storm the ramparts and then zip over to Suzenji Garden for some natural landscapes. Our plans were waylaid, however, when Kumamoto Castle broke out the dance team. But don't worry, we'll get to that.
This doesn't look so tough
A brief miss-remembered history! Kumamoto castle was built a long time ago by a military type person in Japan. He was a pretty clever guy and built a pretty clever castle. Or, more specifically, he built huge, nigh-impenetrable stone fortifications and turned the naturally-defensive terrain already existent into multiple murder zones, around a rather typical castle. Which was good! Because the castle burned down before the rebels arrived.
And it was rebuilt! For us! With dance teams! But don't worry, we'll get to that.
It's hard to define the castle grounds. Our tour started in sort of an outer area, which I shall call the outer courtyard for simplicity. It was located between the wall over-looking the moat, and another wall, under-looking more walls. The sky was cloudy but it was very warm, so we set Locutus down and let him relocate gravel while we read the infographics.
Well
In the outer courtyard was a reconstruction of a covered well, one of some 160 individual wells the clever lord had dug inside the castle fortifications to withstand sieges. This courtyard featured some lovely trees in a variety of hues, a small garden, and a lot of gravel. After some photography, we began our approach to the castle. The stairs looked a bit tricky so we bundled Locutus back into the carrier and set out on our path.
Stairs
The path took us along side one wall to a set of flagstone stairs. Even here, the inner walls were about 30 feet high, sloping gradually from sheer-precipice to really-sheer-precipice. The stone steps led us up one level to the top of the wall and... from the outer courtyard, you can kind of see the castle, but only the top. The inner wall is rather tall and masks a lot of the visibility. It turns out, it also hides another set of walls. Which, in turn, hide another set of walls and then...a small orchard, neatly placed beneath another set of walls. And all of this is accessible by a nice, open-air stone corridor and more-than-adequate firing lanes.
The orchard
This climb should be on the next Tough Mudder
The final set of castle walls was about 60 to 80 feet tall, featured some wooden fortifications built atop the walls (complete with the usual assortment of murder holes and arrow slits that any well-to-do castle attacker would expect to see), and yet another long set of stairs up to...
Hey, that looks like castle!
Just one more flight of stairs, right?
Hah! Fooled you! That's still outer castle wall you saw before. And the wooden building was just the final outer fortifications (now a gift shop!). Good guys are so dumb.
That's no castle!
But congratulations! You made it this far, so you can see the actual castle! It's another 80 feet directly above you! If you just follow this tunnel through the inner wall here and...more murder holes! I can't believe you fell for that!
But seriously, if you come up these open stairs you'll get to the courtyard. And now! There! The castle! And it's run out of walls. It's your lucky day!
Kumamoto castle
And it was our lucky day, too! Because shortly after we arrived at the summit of Castle Kill-a-ma-bob, they announced that they were doing a historical samurai show. We thought, cool! That sounds like when our friends would dress up in fur hats and dingy coats and stand around in Fort Langley telling people about how cold it was and how to best depopulate entire species in the process of staying warm.
Let's learn history through the art of interpretive dance!
Instead, they put on samurai armour, broke out some kendo and instructed us on historical happenings while beating up bad guys. Then! Then! After finishing the first account of someone dumb enough to think storming the castle was a good idea (yet obviously charming enough to convince other people to come along!) they paused the history lesson and did a dance routine.
It. Was. Awesome.
I mean, they had me at the hackin' history lesson; the katana-twirling soft-shoe made my eyes misty. The whole demonstration went on for about an hour. But we couldn't really understand any of it, so after the second history lesson started we let Locutus loose to roam the yard. We let him hold court until he started to get tired.
We wrangled him back into the carrier to explore the castle. I'm not sure when the reconstruction took place because a lot of the inside did not appear to be ferro-concrete reconstruction, which is normal for castles rebuilt in the last century. I have an internet. I could probably look this stuff up. But so do you. And so can you. So stop interrupting my narration.
The museum had some cool stuff: a wooden model of the castle used during the reconstruction process, bits of old things, family history tidbits, and pointy bits of metal. The material was well represented in multiple languages.
The views from atop the castle were spectacular (terrifying) and they even had some of the windows open (more terrifying!) which I was brave enough to lean out of (not even close!) and snap some photos without dropping my camera (totally didn't drop it!). The castle also featured a photographic list of all the castles in Japan! We've been to...maybe six? Only thirty five left to go!
We toured the rest of the grounds some more, stopped by the nearby Edo-era-appropriate shopping arcade for rose-flavored ice creams, and realized we'd had no time for Suzenji. We broke for lunch, then boarded the tram back to the station. We didn't use the tram a lot.
Shopping area
Purple ice cream
Shhh! We're hunting twams!
4 comments:
Or the pram a lot, on your way tooooooo... CAM-E-LOOOOOOOOTT
You made me smile. I can just see Locutus doing what he does best --relocating things. Our house has never been the same. I need him home to find things for me. What a fantastic castle Lance I like the full on picture looking up. love sobu
Awesome narration! :-D
NEE!
Locutus relocates the dirt and gravel at every park. It's a zen thing. He's very zen.
We've been trying to hit a few places each day where we can put him down and let him roam. We've found a couple excellent places in Fukuoka - a nearby temple and a park by the docks - where he is able to practice walking everyday. He's mastering steps like a pro.
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