Guide to Japanese Castles

More Maps and a new Photo Search tool

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:00:00 PDT

I've been working on 2 technical updates recently. One is an enhancement to the mapping features. I'm now adding GPS tags to the pictures I take. All pictures taken since Takiyama Castle are geotagged. I also retroactively added coordinates to pictures from Edo Castle , Nagoya Castle, Ueda Castle, and Matsumoto Castle. If you click the marker on the little map of the profile page for a castle with geotagged pictures, you'll get a bigger map with all the pictures for that castle marked on the map. Also, on the photo page for any photo with location information, you'll get a small map showing its location. Maps for tagged photos display in satellite mode when the resolution is sufficiently good, otherwise it just shows the street map.

The second technical update is a photo searching tool. You may have noticed that I have been tagging new pictures for about the last year with the type of structures contained in the picture. Now you can use this new tool to select pictures based on the structures in them. This is using the faceted search engine Sphinx (Thinking_Sphinx plugin for Rails), just like the castle search page. I still only have about one quarter of my pictures tagged, but I'm working to get the rest done when I can.

Both these new features are works in progress. If you have any comments or suggestions please let me know .

Otaki Castle and Chiba Castle

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:00:00 PDT

I added Otaki Castle and Chiba Castle from a recent day trip to Chiba Pref. Actually, I had been avoiding Chiba Castle a bit because the reconstructed main keep is so fake. No tenshu of that size were built at that time period. Still, it's a castle and I get a lot of questions about it so here it is.

10th Anniversary

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:00:00 PDT

Happy 10th Anniversary!

Today is the Tenth Anniversary of The Guide to Japanese Castles. I never thought this site would be around for this long. That's longer than Wikipedia and older than wikis or blogs. Had they been around back then this site could have evolved completely differently than it has. When I started, I was sure I would be able to see "all" the Japanese castles there were in a couple years . Well, I was definitely wrong there. The world of Japanese castles turned out to be much larger and deeper than I had ever imagined. At the time I had a little booklet I bought at Nagoya Castle called "shiro no shiori" which listed up about 20 or so castles. My goal with this site was to simply put up one or two pictures for each of them. Needless to say, things have changed a lot since then.

Fukuchiyama Castle

Sat, 30 May 2009 08:00:00 PDT

Added Fukuchiyama Castle donated by Raymond W. Thanks again Raymond !!

Takiyama Castle

Sat, 23 May 2009 08:00:00 PDT

Added Takiyama Castle. I had an afternoon to kill before meeting up with a friend in Shinjuku (to see the new Trek movie) so I decided to go visit Takiyama Castle. It's just a short 40 min train ride to Hachioji from Shinjuku and then 15 mins by bus. I can't believe I never thought to visit here before. The castle layout is nearly intact with many moats and baileys. There are several paths around the castle to explore and the large moats are one of a kind in the immediate Tokyo area. You can make it a day trip from Tokyo and visit nearby Hachioji Castle too.

Ako Castle and Marugame Castle

Sat, 16 May 2009 08:00:00 PDT

Added Ako Castle and several new pictures to Marugame Castle , all donated by Raymond W. Thanks again Raymond ! Ako castle looks like a great site so it will be high on my list of places to visit the next time I am in the area. I read that the city is planning to rebuild as much as possible of the castle so it will look like it originally did. Great Work!

Recently, there was also an article in Sankei Shinbun about the renewed interest and rising popularity of castles due to new reconstruction and maintenance efforts. Following on the boom in history from the last couple years, more women are becoming interested in castles too.

New pictures for Morioka Castle and technical updates

Tue, 05 May 2009 08:00:00 PDT

Added all new pictures for Morioka Castle donated by Kevin I. Thanks Kevin!

I also replaced the search engine that runs the Castle Browser and the Castle Map interfaces that allow you to select castles by specific criteria. I switched from the Solr search server to Sphinx, and specifically the Thinking Sphinx plugin for Ruby on Rails. This is a pretty significant update. It took a lot of work to re-build these functions under Sphinx, but Sphinx plays much better with my hosting environment and is much more clean, versatile and easy to work with than Solr. The Thinking Sphinx development community is also MUCH more responsive to users and committed to making a good faceting engine than Acts As Solr. As a part of this upgrade I also "prettified" the URLs in this system. In the old system a selection of the Top 100 castles with 5 stars would look like this
http://www.jcastle.info/castle/map?categories%5B%5D=top_100%3Alisted&categories%5B%5D=
rating%3A5_Stars
now it looks like this:
http://www.jcastle.info/castle/browse/top100/listed/rating/5_Stars/. Not only does this look nicer, but I can take advantage of Rails caching to cache these pages which should make them faster to load, especially for the Map pages.

Updated Matsumoto and Ueda Castles

Sun, 03 May 2009 08:00:00 PDT

Today I added or replaced several pictures for Matsumoto Castle and Ueda Castle from my recent Cherry Blossom viewing (hanami) trip to Nagano. I also have a lot of new content to add in the next few weeks so stay tuned for more.

Takato Castle

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:00:00 PDT

Added Takato Castle from a recent trip to Nagano. I also have some new pictures for Matsumoto Castle and Ueda Castle that I'll upload soon. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom. I took some good pictures and we had a great time. If you can go there during cherry blossom season I highly recommend it.

2 new pictures for Fukuoka Castle

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:00:00 PDT

Added 2 new pictures for Fukuoka Castle of the newly reconstructed Shimonohashi Otemon Gate. Thanks to Japanese Castle Explorer for the awesome pictures with cherry blossoms. If you haven't visited this site in awhile (or not at all) make sure you do.