Volunteers haul Hirosaki Castle keep back toward its stone base

In Hirosaki, at the northern tip of Honshu, groups of about 80 people have been taking turns on 30-metre ropes to pull the three-storey keep of Hirosaki Castle back toward the stone platform it left in 2015.

City officials put the keep's weight at 360 to 400 tonnes. On Saturday volunteers moved it 1.13 metres. On Sunday they added 1.09 metres. By Wednesday, local estimates said about 4,000 people, some from overseas, had taken part and had advanced the tower by nearly five metres. The hand-hauling is meant to cover those five metres through the end of August. Machines will then shift the remaining 73 metres by the end of the year.

Why the tower left its base

Engineers moved the keep about 80 metres in 2015 so they could rebuild the stone walls that hold it. The walls had been damaged in the 1983 Sea of Japan earthquake. The work finished in December 2024 after all 2,185 stones were restacked in their original positions. Officials then asked the public to help pull the tower home.

They did not dismantle it. Kensuke Hayasaka, head of the parks and green spaces division at Hirosaki city, told the Guardian the keep is a nationally designated Important Cultural Property, so the city is using hikiya, a Japanese method of sliding a whole building on rails and rollers. The last time the technique was used on a castle, city officials said, was a century ago. The keep itself was returned to its base once before, in 1915.

Demand for a place on the ropes ran far ahead of the slots. Hayasaka said about 8,000 people applied for 1,800 places across the first two days. Motoharu Nakata, 61, travelled 1,352 kilometres from Hiroshima to pull. Azusa Ninomiya, 46, came from Shimane, on the other side of Honshu, and called it a once-in-a-lifetime memory. Takahiro Kogawa, 56, a Hirosaki resident, told AFP the work felt like trying to move a mountain.

What the keep actually is

Hirosaki Castle was completed in 1611 for the Tsugaru clan. Lightning destroyed the original five-storey tenshu in 1627. The present three-storey tower dates from 1811. It is 14.4 metres high and is the only surviving Edo-period keep in Tohoku. Almost every other castle tower in the region is a modern rebuild. Nine structures on the site, including three corner turrets and five gates, are Important Cultural Properties. The grounds are a National Historic Site.

The keep interior is closed during the move and the later repairs. Full public reopening is scheduled for 2033, after copper roof and exterior work. Hayasaka said the immediate aim is to fix the tower to its base before the first heavy snow of the Aomori winter.

A public ritual with a mechanical remainder

The city is clear that the volunteer phase is partly symbolic. Four thousand people cannot, in a few August days, finish an 80-metre slide of a 400-tonne tower. They can put their names on the first five metres and leave the last 73 to jacks and rails. That split is the story's useful fact. Heritage work here is both a lottery for a rope and a construction timetable that runs to 2033.

For a country that rebuilt most of its castles in concrete after 1868 and again after 1945, an original wooden keep moving intact on rails is rare enough that 8,000 people tried to get a hand on the rope. The next test is quieter: whether the restacked 2,185 stones and the winter weather accept the tower when the machines finish the job.