現存十二天守 (genzon jūni tenshu) translates as "the twelve existing keeps." Nobody voted on it or published it: it is the count of castle keeps built before 1868 that still stand today. The term covers the keep (tenshu), the tower at the heart of the castle, not the whole site. Plenty of castles keep original gates, turrets and walls but lost their tower, and most keeps you can climb elsewhere in Japan are 20th-century rebuilds. Osaka Castle's keep, for example, is a 1931 concrete reconstruction with a lift inside.
So few survived for two reasons. In January 1873 the Meiji government's castle abolition order split Japan's castles into those kept for army use and those handed to the Finance Ministry for disposal, and most keeps in the second group were demolished or sold off in the years that followed. Twenty keeps were still standing going into 1945. Between May and August 1945, air raids and the Hiroshima bomb destroyed seven of them: Nagoya, Okayama, Wakayama, Ogaki, Mito, Hiroshima and Fukuyama. Matsumae's keep in Hokkaido burned in an accidental fire in 1949, leaving the twelve on this page.
Five of the twelve keeps are National Treasures. Himeji, Matsumoto, Inuyama and Hikone have held that status under the postwar heritage law since the early 1950s. Matsue joined them in July 2015, after prayer tablets dated the first month of 1611 turned up at Matsue Shrine in 2012 and settled when the keep was finished. The other seven keeps are Important Cultural Properties.
The count has not changed since 1949, but each keep is an old timber building that needs regular repair, and a keep can close for years at a time. As of September 2026, Hirosaki's keep is shut while it is moved back onto its rebuilt stone base, Maruoka's is under scaffolding for seismic work, and Matsue has a major roof and wall repair scheduled from June 2027 to December 2030. We check every entry against the castle's own announcements.
