Japan's Castle Towns

About this book

Every visitor to Japan climbs a castle. Almost none of them read the city below it — and the city is the larger, livelier half of the story. For two and a half centuries the castle town was Japan's standard urban form: the lord in his keep, the samurai in their ranked garden lanes, the merchants in their storehouse grids, the craftsmen in their quarters, the temples posted at the edges like a second wall. This book guides you through 200 of those towns, quarters and districts — the great capitals, the samurai belts, the merchant and market streets, the moat-and-canal water towns, the temple towns richer than their castles, the making quarters still at work after four centuries, and the complete miniatures small enough to read in an hour. The final 25 entries teach the grammar itself — gates, bends, moats, bells, roof lines — so that any castle town in Japan, in this book or out of it, opens to you like a text. Written in Japan by a Japanese author. 200 entries, every one written for its own streets.