Shooting the Fushimi Momoyama Castle

June 19, 2019 July 18, 2021

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An amazing tale of a haunted castle with a tragic history that reached all of Japan

Fushimi Castle, or Fushimi-Momoyama Castle, is a castle in Kyoto’s Fushimi Ward. It is an amazing Japanese castle with a powerful history located next to the popular Fushimi Inari Shrine. It is also known as Momoyama Castle (“Peach Mountain”), named after the mountain where it was originally located, which was populated by many peach trees.

An Amazing Tale

Fushimi Castle is located in Kyoto’s Fushimi Ward. The castle was intended to be the site for Hideyoshi’s peace talks with Chinese diplomats seeking an end to the Seven-Year War in Korea, but an earthquake destroyed the castle entirely only two years after its completion.

It was rebuilt soon afterwards but fell in a famous siege by Ishida Mitsunari. Torii Mototada defended the castle for eleven days, allowing his lord Tokugawa time to build his own army. This had a profound effect on the Battle of Sekigahara, which came soon afterwards, and which marked the final victory of Tokugawa Ieyasu over all his rivals.

In 1623 it was dismantled and many of its rooms were incorporated into temples across Japan. Many have blood-stained ceilings that had been the floor of a corridor at Fushimi Castle where Torii Mototada and company had committed suicide in 1912. The castle was rebuilt again in 1964.

Shooting the Castle

One of the most difficult shoots of my time in japan, nothing seemed to go right here. The first days photos were all totally white and unusable, and the drone refused to fly complaining of “unknown interference”.

The second day was no better, with the drone finally getting up and shooting over 300 photos, but only 13 were on the memory card, all taken from the wrong directions.

I went to a Japanese priest the next day in Tokyo, who cleansed my soul in a powerful ceremony and told me when i returned to Fushimi to ask the permission of the dead Samurai buried there before shooting. This is what I did, and these are the photos I was able to take.