Matsumoto Castle
A castle on a plain
One of the stupid things about our travel planning is that I thought that renting a car would be half the price as taking the trains. In reality it ended up being 97% of the price of taking the trains, so we still saved money and travel was much more convenient when we had a car. However, the Tateyama Kurobe Alopen Route is a full-day trip that crosses over a mountain range with no roads… so we couldn’t take the car.
We parked the car in Kanazawa for four days and took the bus around the mountain to Matsumoto. This means that renting a car for 7 days and parking it for 4 days was still cheaper than taking trains! I’m sure that if we’d planned the trip better, we could have found a better way of doing it (such as using the Alopen Route car delivery service, but we didn’t find out about that until it was too late). We also passed through an old village called Shirakawa-go on the bus (on the way from Kanazawa to Matsumoto) but didn’t stop because we thought we’d visit it on the way back to Osaka with Yuki’s cousin. However, she had a train pass and we found out that she had booked specific bus tickets that wouldn’t work out with our car itinerary. We ended up having to drive to the Shirakawa-go, an out-of-the-way trip, on the way back to Osaka instead of just stopping there on the way out.
Like Maruoka Castle in Fukui, Matsumoto Castle is an original castle. It is the first castle we visited that is “hirajiro” — a castle built on a plain rather than on a hill or a mountain. I’m not sure I like hirajiro castles because they’re not as dominate as they would be on a hill.
The castle has a nice moat around the main keep, but it looked very shallow. I’m not sure if it’s been partially filled because it only seems to be 1-2 feet deep.
The castle keep is quite large. It is unique for having both a minor keep and turret connected to the main keep. Interestingly, after the period of military threats ceased, a moon-viewing pavilion was added to the main keep. The pavilion is on the left with the red railing in the photo below.
We went inside the main keep, which has a museum of old muskets. It was pretty crowded inside, but it was still possible for us to see how large the castle keep was. The steep stairs were inclined up to 55 degrees, and the top of the structure has a panoramic view of the surrounding city. It was kind of gross to see that the moat was green from the top because it is all stagnant water.
The castle has several employees dressed up in feudal samurai and ninja costumes. We got a few pictures with them.
After exploring the interior, we went around the moat to get the classical view of the castle. All of the photos we’ve seen of Matsumoto castle are from this angle, with the red bridge in the foreground. I wanted to make sure I captured that view as well.
About an hour and a half from Matsumoto is the slightly larger city of Nagano. Yuki’s father wanted to visited the Zenkō-ji temple there, so we bussed there in the afternoon after our visit to Matsumoto Castle.
Zenkō-ji is a 7th-century Buddhist temple founded before Buddhism split into different sects. As such, there is supposedly a secret Buddha statue that is the first Buddha statue to ever be brought to Japan. Not even the chief priest of the temple can see it, but a replica is shown to the public every 6 years in spring.
The temple itself seemed pretty typical of Japanese Buddhist temples. There was a long street of souvenir shops, followed by a large gate and then the main hall.
Although it is free to walk around the temple site, there is an entrance fee to go up the main gate or deep into the main hall. We just walked around the site.
As we were walking around the main hall, I got a good photo through a doorway of a woman praying inside.
Though it was cloudy, it was quite humid and hot out… so we took a break on a bench.
