Japanese castles and the European parallel
In Medieval Europe the trend in castle building had been to build up,
allowing the walls to rise as high as possible so that an assailant's
siege towers and scaling ladders would have to be impossibly long. Japanese
castle technology, prior to the introduction of the tower keep in the
1570s, did not allow a similar use of height through buildings. Instead
height was provided by nature through the yamashiro model, and as another
means of keeping an enemy at bay the Japanese also went for width, joining
neighbouring hills together in a complex of encircling baileys. In this
way Japan anticipated Europe, because the advent of siege artillery in
Europe led to a rapid change in priorities. High medieval walls were too
vulnerable to cannon fire. One solution was to add width to height, so
that European fortresses grew into enormous complexes. Another solution
was to pile up earth behind these walls or inside towers to increase their
thickness. Unfortunately, when breaches were made the earth that fell
out provided an easy slope for an assailant to climb. This problem was
solved with the introduction of the model of low, squat and very thick
walls intended primarily for artillery. The lower walls, of course, made
assault that much easier, so instead of high corner towers lower, quadrilateral
angle bastions were introduced, from where fire could be directed along
the flanks of the building against scaling parties, leaving no blind spots.
The Japanese experience provides an exact parallel. Projecting towers
and walls, easily recognisable as bastions, were added to the Japanese
castle and were referred to picturesquely as koguchi (tigers' mouths).
Alternatively, or in addition, a long wall could be concertinaed into
a design known as by bu (folding screen). Both allowed the important flanking
fire from hundreds of arquebuses. In front of the European bastions would
be a wide ditch, just as in many Japanese examples, with a slope (the
glacis) running down towards the besiegers' lines. This was the castle
design that became known as the trace italienne (the Italian system) because
the style first appeared during the Spanish wars in Italy. The size of
its ditches and walls, and the deployment of sharpshooters with arquebuses
was intended to keep a besiegers' own artillery as far away as possible.
This European technique of low and squat fortresses whose stone walls
were packed behind with earth thus unconsciously imitated the Japanese
design, which used the same technique in reverse by excavating a mountain
and encasing it in stone, so within a few years European fortresses began
to look more like Japanese ones. Also, although Europe possessed more
and heavier cannon than Japan for many years, both models were defended
primarily by gunpowder weapons, with arquebuses predominating in Japan.
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