Site Updates
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 The creator of the Oshiro Meguri Fan website has released a Himeji Castle app for the iPhone. It can work as a navigational device while visiting the castle or you can browse his fantastic collection of Himeji Castle photos from anywhere. All photos are marked on a map along with the major points of interest. A special function lets you examine the main keep as if you were really there. Especially with the reconstruction underway I'm sure this will be appreciated by many people. If you have an iPhone check it now. See the Oshiro Meguri Fan site for more details or jump directly to the iTunes app store. |
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| FINALLY! I moved everything to a new hosting company and new server. This should resolve all the problems that have been occurring since the end of April. At the same time I also changed the feedback form to be entirely internal to rails, no external formmail processing perl script. There are still a few maintenance things I want to do with the new system to make it more efficient but for now it should be well and stable. I have to say that the guys at Webfaction.com are awesome. Very professional and they really know what they are doing. | |||
| Added new pictures for Fushimi Castle and Nijo Castle donated by Raymond W. Thanks again Raymond! In other news, I'm switching from my old webhosting provider to a new one. Last weekend was the final straw. There has been too much downtime and too many problems since they changed management in April. There may be some additional downtime and other issues over the next week or so as I get everything set up on a new server, but I hope this will be more stable and will prevent any future problems. | |||
| This week I added several donations from Raymond W. Yodo Castle and Tanba Kameyama are new castles for this site and I also added or replaced several pictures for Tsuyama and Hikone Castles. Thanks Raymond ! | |||
| I added the last 2 new castles from my Tohoku Castle trip in May: Kunohe Castle and Hachinohe Castle. I also updated pictures for Sendai Castle. I have been to Sendai Castle before but the great stone wall was under repair at the time so I couldn't see anything. These three were my "freebie" castles for this trip. Usually when I go to castles I have a goal of 1 or 2 castles I want to spend time at and then I make a couple variations on different plans to see other castles in the area depending on the time I have left. Sendai was a nice bonus that I didn't even plan for. After Taga Castle, I found myself in Sendai with some spare time and realized that I could just make it to the castle before it started getting too dark.
This will be my last update for a while. I'm going back to the States for about 3 weeks from next weekend. I hope to roll out a couple technical updates before then, but I won't send out a notice. Hopefully, my hosting company won't have any more major meltdowns while I'm gone. I'll have some limited access to email so feel free to drop me a line (especially if there are problems). |
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| I added Taga Castle and Shiwa Castle from my recent trip to Tohoku. Taga Castle is also listed in the Top 100 even though there isn't very much to see. These two castles are josaku type castles built in the Nara and Heian Periods to subjugate the Tohoku region. They are quite different from the castles built in the Azuchi-Momoyama and Edo Periods that we normally think of, but they show some fascinating aspects of the early evolution of castles. On a side note, I had to temporarily remove the Facebook signin option for this site. I'm working on a fix and hope to reinstate it soon. | |||
Today I'm launching a major new feature for Jcastle.info: user accounts. You can create your own account using an email address or Facebook login. Once logged in, record your castle visits, rate individual castles, or even create your own themed pages. These are the major features:
These features are a convergence of several things I've been testing or thinking about for over a year now. I finally decided to put them all together to see what happens and this is how it turned out. In isolation, each piece worked fine but making everything work together turned out to be much more work than I anticipated. It's still rough around the edges so I'm calling it a beta version for now until I get some time to polish this off. In the meanwhile, I have some new content I want to put up first so if you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know via email to eric (@) jcastle.info. I don't know if anyone will ever use these features but it has been an educational, frustrating, sometimes even fun, exercise. As long as the infrastructure is here it will probably become worthwhile eventually. This also opens up many new possibilities for future development. |
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| I recently had a good opportunity to spend a weekend in Tohoku so I went up to visit Hirosaki Castle and Ne Castle. I originally visited Hirosaki in 1999 for the cherry blossom festival but have always wanted to go back and explore the castle the way it should be. While I was there I also visited Ne Castle and a couple others in the area. Ne Castle is one of the Top 100 and one that I didn't know much about, but I'm glad I decided to visit it. The other castles from this two day trip will be uploaded soon.
If you've noticed any downtime, slowness or other errors on this site in the last 2 months it is because my host provider was bought out by another company. They moved all the accounts to different hardware and I've had 6 weeks of problems with them. Incorrect file permissions, lost gems and svn commits, they didn't want to support Sphinx anymore and I had to change some of my code to be more compatible with their systems. Very frustrating. I've been waiting for them to become more stable before I make any updates. Hopefully things will be better now. |
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I finally got out of the house and made my first castle visits of 2010. I've actually been watching the weather every saturday for the last month waiting for a perfect weather report to visit Ashigara Castle. I was hoping to get some pictures like this of a big Mt Fuji in the background. Well, this was one of those times when the weather report was completely wrong. This is what I got instead. Can you see Mt Fuji in the background? No? Me neither... Oh well, maybe next time. This week I made a little trip down to Yokohama to see the ruins of 2 Hojo castles: Kozukue Castle and Chigasaki Castle. They're both fairly minor mid-sixteenth century castles, but fun visits anyway and good examples of this kind of castle. There are no buildings left but they are both kept up well so you can imagine what they would have been like. |
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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. |