Kochi Castle

The only castle where the whole hilltop survives

Twelve castle keeps in Japan are original. At eleven of them, the tower stands alone: the palace, the gates and the walls that once surrounded it are gone, and you climb a bare stone platform to reach it.

Kochi is the exception. Its official site states it plainly — Kochi is the only castle where the entire group of buildings on the honmaru, the main enclosure, still stands. The keep, the lord’s palace, the gates, the storehouse, the corridor and the loopholed walls are all still here, and all of them are original.

Fifteen buildings were designated together as national Important Cultural Properties on 30 January 1934: the keep; the Kaitokukan, which is the honmaru palace; the nando storehouse; the Kurogane gate; the west and east tamon turrets; the Tsumemon; the corridor gate; the Otemon; and six separate stretches of loopholed wall.

You can walk out of the daimyo’s reception room into the keep

The Kaitokukan is not a museum reconstruction of a palace. It is the palace. The official inventory lists what is inside: the jōdan-no-ma, the raised upper room, with its alcove, display shelf and writing bay; second, third and fourth rooms; a storeroom; two three-mat rooms; a privy; the inner passage and the veranda. Single storey, irimoya hipped-and-gabled roof, heavy tiles.

That is the room a Tosa lord received people in, and it opens directly onto the tower. No other castle in Japan lets you do this.

It burned down, and they rebuilt it exactly

In 1727 a fire in the castle town took almost everything — the keep included. Only the Otemon survived. Rebuilding began in 1729, the honmaru in 1746, and the official history says the work was finished by 1753, in the form the castle had when it was first built.

The keep itself was completed in 1749. So the “original” keep at Kochi is an eighteenth-century rebuilding of a seventeenth-century tower, put back deliberately to the old design. That is worth knowing before you compare it with the other eleven: original in Japan usually means “not rebuilt in concrete in the twentieth century”, not “untouched since the day it went up”.

A tower that copies the lord’s old castle

Kochi’s keep is the textbook example of the bōrō or watchtower type — a small lookout set on top of a large gabled roof, the older of the two Japanese keep forms. Four tiers on the outside, three storeys and six floors inside.

The top floor has an open balcony with a railing running right round it. The official site says the first lord, Yamauchi Katsutoyo, is said to have modelled it on his previous castle, Kakegawa in Tōtōmi, and that at the time this was an extremely rare feature — the only one in Shikoku.

It is also an independent keep: no small keep, no attached turret, nothing propping it up.

The city took its name from this hill

Katsutoyo broke ground in 1601, on a hill then called Ōtakasayama. In 1603 the name was changed to Kōchiyama (河中山), and in 1610 changed again to a different spelling, Kōchiyama (高智山). The modern city of Kochi is named after the second change.

What the Meiji government left standing

Under the abolition order of 1871, most of the castle came down. The official record for 1873 says the demolition removed the castle buildings except the honmaru group and the Otemon — which is precisely why there is a complete honmaru to visit today. The grounds opened to the public as a park in 1874.

The castle was made a National Treasure in 1934, then reclassified as an Important Cultural Property in 1950 when the present cultural properties law came in. Repairs ran from 1948 to 1959, and stone wall work has continued into this century.

Hours and admission

Open 9:00–17:00, last entry 16:30, closed 26 December to 1 January. Admission to the keep and Kaitokukan is ¥500 for visitors aged 18 and over and free under 18. A combined ticket with the Kochi Castle Museum of History is ¥800.

Figures checked on the official site on 13 September 2026.