HIROSAKI, Japan — To chants of "so-re, so-re," teams of 80 people took turns heaving on 30-metre ropes over the weekend, inching a 360-tonne wooden castle keep across rails in northern Japan's Aomori prefecture. When the two days ended, the keep of Hirosaki Castle had moved 2.22 metres closer to the foundation it left a decade ago.
The pull covered 1.13 metres on Saturday and 1.09 metres on Sunday. The work relied on hikiya, a building-relocation technique used in Japan since ancient times in which structures are placed on rollers and shifted rather than taken apart. Hirosaki City chose hikiya because the keep carries national designation as an important cultural property, making dismantling prohibited under the terms of that protection.
"Because the keep is a nationally designated important cultural property, we didn't take it apart," said Kensuke Hayasaka, head of the parks and green spaces division at Hirosaki City. "We're using hikiya, a building-relocation method that has existed in Japan since ancient times."
Demand to participate was intense. Hayasaka said the city received roughly 8,000 applications for 1,800 available slots across the two days — about four times oversubscribed. Participants came from Aomori and other parts of Japan as well as from Southeast Asia, Europe and North America.
The weekend effort is the second time citizens have pulled the keep directly. The first came in 2015, when Hirosaki City invited the public to help move the structure roughly 80 metres away from its base so workers could access and repair the stone walls beneath it — walls damaged in a major earthquake. That 2015 pull was the first citizen-driven hikiya on record and the first time the method had been used on any castle in Japan in a century.
The stone-wall restoration took years. Workers completed it in December 2024, restacking all 2,185 stones in their original positions. With the wall finished, the city this year called on volunteers again to begin the return journey.
Motoharu Nakata, 61, travelled from Hiroshima to take part. He had also joined the 2015 pull. "I pulled it 11 years ago too. It's very moving to be able to participate again. There's absolutely no other opportunity to pull a castle — it was fantastic," Nakata told the Sankei Shimbun.
The hand-pulling will continue through the end of August, with about 4,100 people in total scheduled to shift the keep a combined five metres. The remaining approximately 73 metres will be completed using machinery before the end of the year.
Hirosaki Castle carries particular historical weight. The keep is one of only 12 original castle tower structures still standing in Japan and the only one in the north-eastern Tohoku region. The Tsugaru clan built the castle in 1611, but a lightning strike ignited a gunpowder store in 1627 and destroyed the original keep. The current structure dates to 1810 and has stood for more than two centuries.
The castle anchors a public park that draws about 2 million visitors each year during cherry-blossom season, making it one of the most visited sites in northern Japan. The keep's extended absence from its original position — now stretching past a decade — reflects an unusually ambitious preservation effort, one that required moving an entire historic building rather than attempting structural repairs in place.
The hikiya method places buildings on a rail-and-roller system, allowing the load to be distributed and the structure to travel without the stresses of lifting or disassembly. For a wooden building of this age and size, the approach reduces the risk of structural damage that more invasive repair methods would carry.
