Castles in Middle Ages Asia
by Hideyoshi limited all daimyo to a single castle and razed all smaller forts. As a result, the daimyo put all their efforts into the one edifice permitted to them so that Japanese castles built in the late-15th and early 16th centuries rose on the most secure and solid foundations and to spectacular heights.
Around them grew up jo¯kamachi (”castle towns”). This does not mean that 16thcentury Japanese castles would have remained impregnable, as one historian suggested, until aerial bombardment became possible in the 20th century.
That most late Japanese castles did in fact survive into the 20th century is testimony to the long peace under the Tokugawa shoguns, during which no castle was tested by modern weaponry, not to their intrinsic qualities as fortifications. During the Tokugawa shogunate an increasingly useless and parasitic samurai warrior class was organized around the jo¯kamachi built during the Sengoku jidai, and sustained by a bonded peasantry. China did not build castles per se (with exceptions). Instead, Chinese emperors and warlords walled in entire cities and put enormous effort, especially during the Ming dynasty, to defend the Inner Asian frontier with the Great Wall and many lesser defensive walls. Similarly, Indian fortifications tended to be supermassive city defenses rather than ”castles” in the countryside. Some of these were so substantial they later withstood bombardment by 19th-century artillery.
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