There is no embellished castle tower to keep watch over Sasayama, a city ringed by the mountains of central HyogoPrefecture. Only thick stone walls mark the site where an early 17th-century fortress stood. Even in those days, the castle keep was a relatively unimpressive construction when compared to the edifices of major powerhouses like Osaka and Kumamoto castles.
Yet what SasayamaCastle lacks in flair compared to its brethren, it more than makes up for in drama. The history of these formidable stone walls is torn from the pages of the last years of the bloody Sengoku Period (the Warring States Period). Following the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the tattered remnants of the samurai who backed losing general Toyotomi Hideyoshi retreated to OsakaCastle to throw their support behind Hideyoshi’s young son Hideyori. Victor of the battle, Tokugawa Ieyasu, determined to smash the last obstacle blocking his ascent to an uncontested rule of Japan, knew that a siege of Osaka was inevitable.
Though numerous castles dotted the area north of Osaka, none blocked the passage of goods to the city from daimyo (feudal lords) in the west still loyal to Toyotomi. In 1609, Tokugawa sought to remedy this situation by ordering the construction of a castle on a small hillock in the plains of Sasayama, directly in the path of the supply route from the San-in Coast.
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