Site Updates
| Date | Update | ||
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| As you may know, the main keep of Himeji Castle will be under going vast repairs over the next 5 years. Visitors will be able to enter the main keep for most of the time period but the scaffolding will go up after the 2010 cherry blossom season. See this link for more details. From 4/12 you will no longer be able to enter the main keep for the next 10 months. Crowds are expected to be very large until then. Check out the pictures on this blog from last weekend. Wow, the cherry blossoms haven't even bloomed yet. Scaffolding is starting to go up in places outside the keep now. This site is posting weekly updates of the construction progress. If you want to go, go soon! I'm certainly glad I went last November ! | |||
| When I switched my faceted search from Solr to Sphinx last spring I removed the keyword search function, but now I finally rewrote it using Sphinx. Some pages have a search box or you can use the dedicated Search page. I also made many minor updates to the code and style for things that had been bugging me or that people had commented on like pagination on the top and bottom of the castle list on the Castles page. In the castle facets, I also made a change to the Visited facet to accept multiple values. If I've visited a castle more than once it will appear under each year rather than just the last year. This was tricky because indexing one-to-many relationships for facets is not well documented.
Finally, I created one new page based on comments and emails I've received from visitors over the past couple months. The new Castle Restoration and Repairs page attempts to list any ongoing restoration, repair, or construction projects at castles that might affect your visit. There's nothing worse than traveling to a castle only to find it covered in scaffolding or not even open. It has happened to me a few times too. The page currently lists the major projects that I know of, but if you have any further information please send it to me. I plan to actively keep my eyes open for any new projects and will update the page as soon as I can. |
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| Jcastle.info Year in Review
This has been an incredible year for visiting castles and adding content to this site. Three overnight trips and a couple day trips combined to give me 21 castle visits this year, 17 of them were first time visits. In order, I visited...
Besides castles, I added some new Structures pages for Wooden/clay walls, Roofs & Gables, and a short article about the castle architect Todo Takatora. In between the content updates, I found some time to work on the technical aspects of this site too.
In 10 years of working on this site, 2009 was by far the most content rich. It will be hard to equal that again, but we'll see what 2010 brings. |
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| Happy New Year! Himeji Castle has been updated with mostly new pictures from my November trip. I may have gone a little overboard this time with 34 pictures for Himeji Castle, including pictures and descriptions for most of the major structures and Important Cultural Property buildings. Finally, all the updates from my autumn castle trips are complete. I still need to update some of the Structures pages with new pictures but the majority of content updates are done for awhile. If you are in Tokyo on Jan 2, you should visit the imperial palace for Ippan Sanga when the emperor gives his New Year's greetings. You can walk through some parts of the castle that you normally never get to see like the Fujimi Yagura and Fushimi Yagura. See this page for more details in English. If you go, plan to arrive early. Lines are very long. | |||
| I added the last 2 castles from my October trip to the Hamamatsu area. Nishio Castle was a worthwhile visit if you've seen the more famous castles in the area, but as I put in the comments for Ansho Castle, I think I was "tricked" into going here by a poster at Mikawa Anjo station. I had some extra time so it wasn't really a loss and the location is historically interesting even if there wasn't much to see. | |||
| I updated Takeda Castle with pictures from my recent trip. A lot of the pictures are of basically the same things but the ruins are so nice and photogenic that I had a hard time narrowing them down to even these. I still have to add 2 new castles from October and update new pictures for Himeji, but I don't think I can finish them all by the end of the year. | |||
| Updated Akashi Castle with my own all new pictures from my recent Kyoto trip. Updates are going slower than expected, but I'll try to update something every week until the last four are done. | |||
| Here are the first two castle updates from my recent trip to the Kansai area: Fukuyama Castle and Okayama Castle. They are both excellent castles to visit if you're travelling in Western Japan. More castles updates will be coming soon... | |||
| I added all new pictures for Yoshida Castle from my October castle trip to the area. I visited Yoshida Castle for the first time on my way back from Nagashino Castle because I had some extra time in the afternoon. I'm very glad I stopped. I was pleasantly surprised that the castle was much better and more extensive than I had previously known. I still have 2 new minor locations to add but I will probably work on them after I make some other updates. I just got back from a trip to the Himeji area that took me to 5 castles in 2 days, including Himeji Castle. Pictures should be coming soon.... | |||
| Added Takane Castle and Nagashino Castle from my recent trip to Shizuoka. Takane Castle was actually the stimulus for this little trip. I've been wanting to visit it since I picked up the book 戦国の山城 (sengoku no yamajiro), "Sengoku Period Mountaintop Castles", a couple of years ago and especially after visiting Arato Castle last fall. | |||
| I recently took an overnight trip to the Hamamatsu/Toyohashi area where I visited 7 castles in 2 days. The first leg of that trip took me back to Kakegawa Castle for the first time in 10 years. I also visited the nearby Yokosuka Castle. I debated whether to visit Takatenjin Castle which is physically fairly close to Yokosuka but by taking a combination of infrequent busses and trains from Yokosuka Castle or Kakegawa, it would have eaten up half a day for a location that has very few castle remains. I decided to go elsewhere instead, even though the history of Takatenjin Castle is closely related to that of Yokosuka Castle. It's not too far from Tokyo so I may make another trip there sometime or stop on the way to or from points farther west. | |||
| I added Ishigakiyama Ichiya Castle and all new pictures for Odawara Castle from a recent day trip. These two castles are a perfect combination to do in a day trip from Tokyo. I happened to go on the national holiday "Sports Day" and certainly walked enough to live up to the holiday. | |||
| Today I posted a short article about Todo Takatora. This is something I have been wanting to do for a long time. Several years ago after I visited Imabari, where I first heard of Todo Takatora, I noticed that his name appeared in relation to several other castles too so I kept an eye out for more information about him. He has biographies in many books about the Sengoku and Edo Period lords but I haven't seen anything that focuses on his castles. That collection of information resulted in this article. Perhaps soon I will do another article on Kato Kiyomasa, who was also a well-known castle architect. | |||
| Added Saga Castle, Kushima Castle and Akizuki Castle donated by the site Japanese Castle Explorer. Thanks again Daniel! | |||
| Added a new Structures page for Roofs and Gables. I also added a couple other images of structural display models from Utsunomiya Castle to the structures pages for Walls and Yagura. Finally I redesigned the Structures introduction page. | |||
| Added Iwatsuki Castle in Saitama. | |||
| Added several new pictures to Akashi Castle and Tatsuno Castle donated by Raymond W. Thanks again Raymond !! | |||
| Added several new pictures to Matsue Castle and Tottori Castle donated by Raymond W. Thanks again Raymond ! | |||
| Added a new Structures page about wooden & clay/dirt walls. They are the numerous white walls you see at many castles. This page was created at the request of a reader. If there are any strctures you'd like me to write a page about, please let me know via the feedback link at the bottom of each page. I did something a little different with this page and put a couple pictures in a popup "lightbox." This allows you to see larger versions of some pictures that don't have full pages of their own and don't really need them. | |||
| Added Tottori Castle donated by Brandon S. Thanks Brandon! |