Nijō Castle, Japanese feudal castle in Nakagyō-ku, Kyoto, Japan
Nijō Castle is a former seat of the Tokugawa shoguns in central Kyoto, Japan, encompassing palace buildings and garden grounds. The Ninomaru Palace forms the main complex with six connected pavilions, surrounded by landscaped ponds and pruned pine trees, while the Honmaru area occupies the inner enclosure.
Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered the castle built in 1601 as his Kyoto residence, with construction completed in 1626 under his grandson Iemitsu. The five-story keep, moved from Yamato-Kōriyama Castle, burned after a lightning strike in 1750, and the Honmaru Palace was destroyed by the citywide fire of 1788. In 1867 Tokugawa Yoshinobu declared the return of power to the Imperial Court in the Ninomaru Palace.
The palace rooms are named by function and rank, from the Yanagi-no-ma (Willow Room) where low-ranking visitors waited to the Ōhiroma Great Hall of four chambers and the shogun's living quarters, where only female attendants were admitted. The sliding doors and walls carry paintings by artists of the Kanō school.
The site opens in the morning and closes by early afternoon; the Ninomaru Palace requires a separate ticket and can be crowded during peak hours. A nearby subway station makes arrival easy, and wide outdoor paths are accessible for wheelchairs, though palace interiors have steps.
The nightingale floors in the Ninomaru Palace corridors chirp when walked on, but the sound comes from clamps rubbing against nails in the supporting beams, not from a built-in alarm. The palace does hold real defensive features: some rooms have hidden doors through which the shogun's bodyguards could slip out.
The community of curious travelers
AroundUs brings together thousands of curated places, local tips, and hidden gems, enriched daily by 92,098 contributors worldwide.
