Volunteers in Japan pull 360-tonne Hirosaki Castle keep by hand to return it to repaired foundation

Traditional relocation technique

In the city of Hirosaki, situated in northern Japan's Aomori Prefecture, municipal authorities organized a public operation to shift the 360-tonne castle keep back to its original location. Over the course of the weekend, approximately 1,800 volunteers gathered in rotating groups of 80 to pull the massive structure along specially installed rails using 30-meter ropes. Pulling in rhythm to the traditional chant of "so-re, so-re," the participants advanced the fortified tower by 1.13 meters on Saturday and an additional 1.09 meters on Sunday. Rather than dismantling and rebuilding the monument, officials deployed the ancient Japanese technique of hikiya, which separates a building from its base and shifts it entirely on rollers and tracks. The method was historically utilized for urban planning and road expansion projects, but Japanese conservators now apply it to safeguard cultural properties from structural disruption. Kensuke Hayasaka, head of the parks and green spaces division at Hirosaki City Hall, stated why the municipality rejected disassembly.

As the keep is designated an important cultural property at the national level, we did not dismantle it.

Public demand and international participation

The city government launched a public recruitment drive for the relocation effort, drawing intense interest from across Japan and abroad. Municipal organizers logged roughly 8,000 applications for the 1,800 available weekend positions, creating a fourfold oversubscription that forced authorities to conduct a lottery. The selected participants included local residents alongside travelers arriving from North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Among the volunteers was 61-year-old Motoharu Nakata, who traveled from Hiroshima to assist with the pulling after having participated in an earlier phase of the relocation. Nakata expressed his enthusiasm to the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun after completing his shift on the ropes.

I also pulled it 11 years ago. It is very exciting to take part again. There is no other opportunity in the world to pull a castle.

Wall restoration and relocation scope

The castle keep was originally moved 78 meters away from its perch in 2015 to permit extensive repairs on an adjacent stone defensive embankment damaged by an earthquake. That 2015 initiative marked the first time in a century that Japan used the hikiya method on a castle, as well as the first time ordinary citizens took part directly in the physical hauling. Reconstruction of the defensive rampart required nearly a decade of detailed work, concluding in December 2024 after masons repositioned 2,185 individual stones into their original alignments. With the foundation restored, municipal officials initiated the return operation, termed hikidōshi, in June 2026 to bring the tower back over the repaired rampart.

Machinery takeover and future reopening

The manual pulling phase will continue through the end of August 2026, eventually mobilizing an estimated 4,100 volunteers to move the keep across a total distance of five meters. Once the community pulling concludes, industrial contractors will use heavy machinery and hydraulic systems to complete the remaining 73 meters of the journey before the end of the year. Hirosaki Castle was initially constructed in 1611, though the current three-story keep dates to 1810 following a fire that destroyed the seventeenth-century fortification. The structure stands as one of only 12 original castle keeps surviving throughout Japan, and the only surviving keep in the Tohoku region. Following the completion of the physical relocation at the end of 2026, subsequent preservation and stabilization works will continue until the complex officially reopens to visitors in 2033.