Gusuku

• Okinawan: 城・グスク (gusuku/gushiku)

Gusuku are Okinawan castles or fortresses. Known especially for their long, winding stone walls, the height of gusuku construction was in the 14th century, a time of conflict on Okinawa Island. Five are included alongside a handful of other Okinawan sites in a single group World Heritage Site as "Gusuku Sites and Related Properties of the Kingdom of Ryukyu." Most gusuku are today in ruins; only Shuri castle has been reconstructed.

History

Local power-holders known as anji - who might be understood as chiefs, village heads, local lords, or by a number of other descriptors - first began to emerge in the 8th to 10th centuries. Communities became more organized and began to emerge as distinctive locales, quite possibly with walls or other fortifications separating villages from wilderness, and from one another. Though today, especially in standard Japanese or in English, the term "gusuku" is used almost exclusively to refer to a specific type of fortress, placenames preserve the fact the the term originally referred to villages, and was later used to refer to a wide variety of structures, including guardtowers and warehouses, places of worship, and tombs. Today, there are over 300 places on Okinawa which are called gusuku.

Gusuku construction took off in the 14th century as a few powerful anji emerged, seeking to expand their power, and fueling a period of armed conflict. Most of the largest and most famous fortresses, and those with the most impressive stone walls, date to this period.

The island was soon divided into three kingdoms, known as Hokuzan, Chûzan, and Nanzan.

Architecture and Layout

Perhaps because so many are in ruins, the aspect most strongly associated with gusuku is their long, snaking stone walls. Aside from their overall long, snaking form, a few features of gusuku walls stand out. First, the gates are essentially gaps in the stone, filled in with wooden gatehouse structures, most often simply extended across the top of the opening, with heavy doors below. Though these gatehouses were often equipped with arrow-ports and gunports (see firearms in Ryukyu), the walls themselves were not, and lacking anything on the wall for defenders to hide behind while they fired on attackers, many were quite easily cut down by gunfire in the 1609 invasion of Ryûkyû by samurai from Satsuma han, for example.

The walls themselves were constructed in a number of different ways, quite similar to those employed in Japanese Azuchi-Momoyama or Edo period castles a few centuries later.