Reconstruction of the Stone Walls
This site is one of many locations used to store stones from the castle walls that collapsed in the 2016 earthquake. Before being moved here, the stones were photographed where they had fallen. The outer face of each stone was then photographed to record its shape, and each stone was marked. The mark is in three parts: a letter indicating the wall’s general location (for example, “h” for honmaru inner compound); a number indicating the specific wall the stone comes from; and a second number for the order in which the stone was collected. Kumamoto Castle has roughly 980 individual wall surfaces, with between 70,000 and 100,000 stones that need to be put back into place. This field contains around 4,000 stones.