Jay Castle
Tokyo, Japan
Contacts:
jcastle.info (at symbol) gmail.com
Facebook
The goal of this site is to be the most comprehensive source of information about Japanese Castles in English. I have put significant effort into developing and editing this site over the years. The information architecture and classification of castles and photos, in particular, is unique even among sources in Japanese. I have tried to verify the facts in this site in at least 2 sources where possible. Please let me know if you spot any problems.
Now that I'm developing this site in MediaWiki since the July 2017, I have a lot more freedom with how to structure and build out the site and not worry about system programming and upgrades. Once I get caught up on updating the castle pages I'd like to start adding further content about castle related sites such as Castle Towns, Samurai Homes, and more about castle structures like stone walls. User Contributions and help are always appreciated. Please reach out via the mail above or social media channels for more information or just to talk castles.
Personally, I became interested in Japanese castles when I was an AFS high school exchange student to Tokyo in 1992. I went with my host family to visit my host father's birthplace of Matsumoto (Nagano Prefecture) where I saw Matsumoto Castle. During that summer, I also visited castles in Nagoya, Inuyama and Gifu. I visited a few more castles as a college exchange student to Nagoya in 1995-1996 as a passing interest and saw even more of them while I was working in Fukushima (1997-1999). Now that I am back in Japan (2001- ?) I'm regularly adding new content.
This site started in 1998 as "Adventures in Japan", a blog I started while teaching English in Fukushima, even though the word "blog" did not exist yet. I was mostly scanning photos and hard coding individual HTML pages. The Jcastle.info domain and castle focused website started in 1999 as a project I created as a graduate student in the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science (UNC SILS).