Edo Castle Stone Quarries Feature published

Edo Castle Stone Quarries Feature published

2021/04/18

Edo Castle Stone Quarries

I published this new article on the stone quarries and kokuin of Edo Castle. It maninly covers the details of quarrying stone for Edo Castle and has deatiled profiles for 12 stone quarry areas in Kanagawa and Shizuoka. The topic is probably only of interest to a very small fraction of castle fans, but it's been an area of great interest to me for a long time. I had much fun gathering all my thoughts, trivia and photos in one place. If you only skim the article and come away with a little more appreciation of the work that went into building the massive walls of castles like Edo Castle, I will be satisfied. If you dig into the pictures from the individual quarries and imagine the process of building the walls starting from the mountains of Izu, you may be as amazed as I.

I started writing this article some time (years) ago and have stopped and started several times since. It seems once I get caught up on updating castle visits I come back to this topic but never quite finish it as I inevitably visit more castles that need to be updated. With the long State of Emergency this winter 2021 due to COVID-19 I tried to pull this information together into one cohesive article. It originally started as a project to document all the little places around Tokyo where you can find remains of the original Edo Castle stone walls and other interesting castle wall trivia. That article morphed into a showcase of kokuin, but I can't talk about kokuin without talking about "why" the stones were marked. That leads to tenkabushin and stone quarries and that gave me the perfect showcase to dig out and organize my stone quarry photos. If the article seems a little disjointed, that's why. It followed my own journey down this rabbit hole. Now that I have this "starter" article out of the way, I'll flesh out some of the other topics that have been dropped along the way, but for now, here is the (hopefully) first article in a series about Edo Castle Stone Walls. If anyone wants to sponsor me to write a book about the stone walls of Edo Castle, please reach out and I'll get it done much faster ! I think I probably have enough content for a whole book stored in PDFs, photocopies, Evernote and random trivia locked up in my memory.

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