Several rings of walls and moats serve as the main defense measure of castles. Osaka Castle and the former Edo Castle (now Tokyo's Imperial Palace) offer the most impressive examples.
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By making the earthwork walls around the kuruwa curved rather than straight, it became possible to attack the advancing enemy from the sides as well as the front. Side attacks were also common on soldiers entering through the koguchi or castle entrance.
Osaka Castle was constructed in 1585 by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He used it as his base to unify Japan after many years of war. The huge castle took two years to build, with a crew of 20,000 to 30,000 working daily. The stone walls for the main, secondary and tertiary enclosures measure about 12 km in length.
Chief among these is Himeji Castle in Osaka, which was built in 1609. It's listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and is one of only twelve Japanese castles whose wooden dungeon dates back to the feudal era.
Outer curtain wallsThose valiant enough to make it across the moat were faced with the highly forbidding outer curtain wall. Surrounding the courtyards of castles, outer curtain walls were often built to imposing heights of over 30 feet and were thick enough to withstand attacks from battering rams.
Battlements. Battlements were walls on the roof of a castle. They had higher walls, called merlons, with lower gaps between, called crenels. Defenders would use crossbows to shoot arrows through the crenels,and then hide behind the higher merlons.
The castle was originally constructed in the 1590s, but was destroyed by the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945. The castle was rebuilt in 1958, a replica of the original that now serves as a museum of Hiroshima's history before World War II. Reconstructed main keep.
After the end of the feudal age (1868), many castles were destroyed as unwelcome relics of the past or were lost in World War II. Only a dozen original castles, i.e. castles with a main keep that dates from the feudal era (before 1868), survive today.
As a result, over 3,000 castles were reduced to 170, about 95% of the Japanese castles were ruined. About 260 years later, in 1873, the Meiji government promulgated the law of demolishing the castles to proceed with the westernization in Japan.