Concrete castle for only $2.5 million dollars
It’s huge and fake, and only 300 million yen!
According to my funky rewrite of a machine translation of the Sponichi News (September 18, 2007)….
Nakatsu castle on sale
The 19th master of the castle decided to sell the castle.
Original castle was built by Kuroda Kanbe a retainer of Hideyoshi.
But current castle is reconstructed in 60s and it’s made with concrete…more...
It’s only 300 million yen ($2.5 million dollars), which sounds great when regular, middle-class houses in Japan sell for 100 million yen. The owner of the Nakatsu Castle, Masayuki Okudaira, the 19th daimyo/lord says that the maintenance costs exceed the annual income of about 10 million yen from admission fees. In addition, the City of Nakatsu is unwilling to take on the large fiscal burden of keeping it open. Thus, the entire castle is for sale for less that 10 times its annual income.
However, there’s a big catch…. All but a handful of Japan’s more-than-one-hundred castles are real. Most are like this Nakatsu-Jo/castle—They are empty ferro-concrete shells built as tourist traps in the 1960s using government “subsidies” (kickbacks to politician-owned construction companies). Even the present castle lord explains that, “the castle tower is ferro-concrete structure with an empty interior like a warehouse and the walls only provide the image of a castle and its keep.”
Just look at the interior of the huge-&-famous Osaka Castle below. The upper windows for archers are just rough holes in the bare concrete forms that the workers didn’t even bother remove. Even Disney castles are 100 times better than most of the crappy concrete castles of Japan both inside and out.
However, if you want to see one of the five real Japanese castles, be sure to visit my hometown castles Uwajima-jo in Matsuyama and Bitchumatsuyama-jo , which are built only of stone and wood without any crappy concrete or even nails.
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