For many Japanese film buffs, the name Kishiwada is synonymous with Miike Takashi's 1997 movie "Young Thugs, Innocent Blood" — an example of a cinematic genre described by film auteur Donald Richie as "anarchic and set in the brutal and amoral present."
However, as far as I could tell while strolling through residential back lanes to the city of Kishiwada's historical district, any mean streets in this place on Osaka Bay in southern Osaka Prefecture were entirely in the director's imagination.
The centerpiece of Kishiwada turns out to be neither gangland, barland nor strip-club land — but its castle. Commissioned by Koide Hidemasa, a relative of Japan's great unifier Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98), lightning struck its five-storey donjon in the early 19th-century. The concrete, three-storey replacement, built in 1954, is now a museum, but the most arresting feature of the site is the garden created in its forecourt by design radical Mirei Shigemori, a leading figure in the development of the modern Japanese garden. The garden was completed on Dec. 20, 1953.
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