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Japan is a land of many architectural treasures, but some are so under-the-radar that they might not even be recognized as “architecture.” This is especially the case for the stone foundations of Azuchi Castle in the city of Ōmihachiman (Shiga Prefecture), on the shores of Lake Biwa. Ōmihachiman is a gem of a city, still largely undiscovered by international tourists, that only takes 35 minutes to get to by express train from Kyoto.

As soon as one exits the station there, one steps into a world very different from the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto. Much of Ōmihachiman’s historic townscape survives from the Edo period, when it was home to wealthy merchants who took advantage of their proximity to Lake Biwa, the world’s sixth largest freshwater lake, to transport goods to other parts of the archipelago. One can traverse the historic district by boat on one of Japan’s most picturesque canals, formerly a castle moat. Along with an impressive medieval Buddhist temple (Jōgon’in) and an ancient shrine (Sasaki), visitors can also take in a wonderfully preserved premodern merchant home (Nishikawa Residence) and the Kawara Museum, the premier roof tile museum in the country. A ropeway to Mount Hachiman to the north offers walking trails with spectacular views of Lake Biwa and the surrounding countryside. And the western-style buildings constructed by the American William Merrel Vories (1880-1964) are particularly notable. Vories came to Japan in 1905 as an English teacher but eventually founded an architectural firm that would design over 1,000 buildings in the country. Vories also became a prominent Christian missionary—he even introduced the first Hammond Organ to the archipelago—and became the first Honorary Citizen of Ōmihachiman.

But easily the most interesting and impressive site in Ōmihachiman is the stone foundation (ishigaki) of Azuchi Castle. A road north of Azuchi Station leads to the steps of the former castle as they ascend Mount Azuchi, which rises almost 200 meters above sea level. As one ascends, on either side are stone walls in which large and small stones are fitted together without mortar or other binding agents, a method of construction that seems both primitive and ingenious at the same time.

The logic behind this “drywalling” has everything to do with the prevalence of earthquakes in Japan, and the importance of allowing the stones that make up the foundation and walls to move against one another should an earthquake occur, thereby absorbing seismic shock as it makes its way upward. After various twists and turns, one finally reaches the main plateau of Mount Azuchi on which the tenshu, or castle tower, once stood. No such edifice now exists, but one is treated instead to remarkable vistas in all directions, including Lake Biwa. Just as importantly, however, Azuchi Castle’s ruins are the site of remarkable new insights about what was once one of the most splendid and unusual structures anywhere in the world.

Azuchi Castle was completed in the year 1579, after three years of intensive construction overseen by the warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582). Nobunaga’s imprint on Japanese history is significant. He commenced the unification of Japan after roughly a century of civil war and unrest, a period aptly referred to as the “Warring States era” (Sengoku jidai, 1467-1568). Upon assuming control of the imperial capital Kyoto and defeating his most formidable rival Takeda Shingen at the Battle of Nagashino (1575), Nobunaga turned his attention to the construction of a castle-palace whose magnificence would exceed anything before it. The site of Mount Azuchi was chosen for its strategic location as both a military stronghold and trade entrepot. As fate would have it, however, only three years after Azuchi Castle was completed, Nobunaga was assassinated and Azuchi Castle burned to the ground in the ensuing chaos.

Fortunately for us, Nobunaga commissioned several textual descriptions or “portraits” of the castle-palace when it was built, as well as a pair of screen paintings depicting the castle-palace by the painter Kano Eitoku (1543-1590). Eitoku’s screens depicted the buildings and surrounding town of Azuchi Castle in bright mineral pigments against a gold-foil backdrop. They were eventually included among the travel accessories of a remarkable entourage arranged by the Jesuit Mission, centered around four young sons of prominent Christian daimyo, which toured Southern Europe and ultimately was granted an audience with Pope Gregory XIII in Rome. The Japanese Christian boys met the pope in 1585 and presented him with the Azuchi Screens. The screens were displayed for a number of years in the Vatican’s Gallery of Maps before disappearing from the historical record. Some believe that they still survive, hidden somewhere in the collection of one of the great families of Italy or elsewhere in Europe.

The textual accounts of Azuchi Castle, however, provide us with a great deal of information about the castle. They consist of a room-by-room description by the warrior Murai Sadakatsu and an encomium by the Zen monk Nanka Genkō. According to these accounts, the castle was adorned with mural décor overseen by Kano Eitoku and his studio assistants, at the time the most prominent painting atelier in all the land. This décor included nature subjects such as birds-and-flowers, Chinese mythological figures, Confucian figures, and the Buddha surrounded by his disciples. It combined iconographies of rulership from different pictorial traditions into a veritable museum of East Asian painting subjects. As for the structure of the castle itself, specialists offer differing reconstructions, but all agree that the tower was a radically new type of building in its time consisting of seven stories of which the top two were octagonal (penultimate) and square (highest). Structurally the tower reconfigured the preexisting vocabulary of temple and palace architecture into something hybrid and dynamic.

Although Azuchi Castle’s architectural magnificence can only be imagined today, continuous excavation on Mount Azuchi from 1989 to 2009, and starting again from 2024, has yielded new insights. The configuration of the original stone foundations has been slowly restored, revealing more and more of the basic layout of Nobunaga’s palace. Fragments of roof tiles indicate unambiguously that they were adorned with gold foil. The nature of other buildings in and around the tenshu have become clearer. The path of the dramatic ascent up the mountain can now be experienced as it would have in its own time. And the foundation stones that supported the massive main pillars of the tower have now been uncovered and are themselves a sight to behold.

The cultural and architectural meanings of Azuchi Castle have also been the subject of innovative new thinking. Professor Mark Erdmann (University of Melbourne), a scholar of Japanese architecture and a leading authority on Azuchi Castle, has studied extensively the excavation site and the castle’s history. Erdmann observes that the layout of the tenshu dias is unusual. It consists of a warped polygonal shape that should be interpreted as octagonal, but an octagon that has been stretched to fit the particularities of the topography. According to the conventions of East Asian timber-frame architecture, however, this makes the shape of the site equivalent to a circle, because an octagon is an expression or “translation” of circularity. And because the base of the tenshu was square, the ground plan of the castle’s tower could be conceived of as a square within a circle. This form and its repetition in the crowning octagonal and square-storied belvedere render the tenshu akin to a mingtang, an ancient Chinese architecture for state ritual that expressed the structure of the cosmos in terms of the relationship of the earth (square) to heaven (circle).

Erdmann’s findings have profound implications for the understanding of Azuchi Castle, Nobunaga’s rulership, and Japanese history during this period. Nobunaga rose to power at a moment when traditional Japanese forms of rulership were waning. The emperor and aristocracy in Kyoto held only symbolic authority, and Nobunaga himself was responsible for ousting the last medieval Ashikaga shogun from power. Amidst this vacuum, Nobunaga drew upon a creatively mixed and reconfigured symbology of kingship to frame himself as supreme ruler. This symbology was both new and ancient, Buddhist and Confucian, local and international. And it was expressed in an unusual new type of high-rise castle-palace in a country where high-rise structures had previously been limited to Buddhist pagodas. It is uncanny to think that one could have a pleasant hike through the picturesque town of Ōmihachiman to this quiet, forested hillock, and gaze upon a site where this radically innovative architecture of supremacy once stood for three heady years as the new capital of Japan.