Osaka Castle
Japanese castle in Chūō-ku, Osaka, Japan
Osaka Castle (Japanese: 大坂城 or 大阪城, Hepburn: Ōsaka-jō) is a Japanese castle in Chūō-ku, Osaka, Japan. The castle is one of Japan's most famous landmarks and played a major role in the unification of Japan during the sixteenth century of the Azuchi–Momoyama period.
Layout
The inner keep of Osaka Castle is situated on a plot of land roughly one square kilometre. It is built on two raised platforms of landfill supported by sheer walls of cut rock, using a technique called burdock piling, each overlooking a moat. The keep is five stories tall on the outside and eight on the inside, built atop a tall stone foundation to protect its occupants from attackers.
A series of moats and defensive fortifications surrounds the main keep. The castle has two moats (an inner and an outer one). The inner castle moat lies within the castle grounds and consists of two types: wet (northern-easterly) and dry (south-westerly). The outer moat, meanwhile, surrounds the entire castle and denotes its outer limits, consisting of four water-filled sections, each representing a cardinal direction (North, East, South, West).
The castle grounds, which cover approximately 61,000 square metres (15 acres), contain the following thirteen structures that were denoted as "important cultural assets" by the Japanese government:
Ote-mon Gate
Sakura-mon Gate
Ichiban-yagura Turret
Inui-yagura Turret
Rokuban-yagura Turret
Sengan Turret
Tamon Turret
Kinmeisui Well
Kinzo Storehouse
Enshogura Gunpowder Magazine
Three sections of 'dobei' mud-and-plaster wall, all located around the Otemon Gate; each has its own Important Cultural Property status
There are also some megaliths at the castle, including the Octopus stone, but these have no cultural property status.
The public source identifies “Osaka Castle” as japanese castle in Chūō-ku, Osaka, Japan. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Osaka, Castle and Japanese.
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This entry incorporates text from “Osaka Castle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.