Azuchi Castle Ruins

**It is a stone staircase up a mountain.** Long, steep, uneven and unrailed. This is the single thing to know before buying a ticket, and it is why the site is quiet. **Nothing was rebuilt and nothing will be.** The keep platform is bare stone. If you want a castle to look at, this is the wrong site; if you want to stand where the template for every Japanese castle keep was invented, this is the only one. **Sokenji is on the way up.** The temple Nobunaga built inside his own castle grounds, with its three-storey pagoda and gate surviving, part way along the stairway. **Go to the museum after, not before.** The archaeological museum has the reconstruction models and the excavation record, and it makes far more sense once you have walked the ground. **Nobunaga installed himself as an object of worship here.** Contemporary accounts have him requiring visitors to venerate a stone in the castle grounds on his birthday, which is either the arrogance or the political theatre the whole building was about. **Nobunaga no Yakata is nearby.** A full-scale reconstruction of the top two storeys of the keep, built for the 1992 Seville Expo and now housed near the museum.