Japan Enlists 1,800 Volunteers to Drag 360-Tonne Castle With Ropes

About 1,800 people gathered in northern Japan over the weekend to physically pull a 360-tonne castle keep more than two metres closer to its original position, using ropes and rollers rather than machinery.

The keep, a fortified tower within Hirosaki Castle in Aomori prefecture, needed to move so crews could repair a wall damaged during a major earthquake. Rotating teams of 80 people at a time hauled on 30-metre ropes as the structure, mounted on rails, inched forward.

Participants moved the building 1.13 metres on Saturday and a further 1.09 metres on Sunday, chanting "so-re, so-re" as they worked in coordinated bursts.

Kensuke Hayasaka, head of the parks and green spaces division at Hirosaki City, said the event drew roughly 8,000 applications for 1,800 available slots, describing interest from Not only from the city, but from across Japan and overseas with a fair share of applicants from south-east Asia, Europe and North America.

The project relies on a traditional technique called hikiya, in which buildings are placed on rollers and physically relocated rather than dismantled piece by piece. Officials chose that approach because the keep holds status as a nationally designated important cultural property.

Hirosaki first opened the process to public participation in 2015, creating what organisers describe as the first citizen-driven hikiya and the first time in a century the method had been used to move a castle in any form.

Work on the site has continued since then. Repairs to the damaged wall finished in December 2024, with all 2,185 original stones restacked in their original arrangement before officials called on the public again this year to help pull the keep back toward its resting place.

Among this year's volunteers was Motoharu Nakata, 61, who travelled from Hiroshima on the opposite end of the country. Nakata, who also took part in the 2015 event, described the experience as a rare chance unavailable anywhere else.

Manual pulling will continue through the end of August, with around 4,100 people expected to move the keep a combined five metres by hand. The remaining distance, roughly 73 metres in total, will be completed using machinery by the end of the year.

Hirosaki's keep ranks among 12 surviving castle keeps in Japan and stands as the only one remaining in the country's north-eastern Tohoku region. The castle, seat of the historic Tsugaru clan, was originally completed in 1611. Its first keep burned down in 1627 after a lightning strike ignited a stored supply of gunpowder, and the current structure was rebuilt in 1810.

Today the castle anchors a park that attracts around two million visitors annually, particularly during cherry blossom season. Once the keep returns to its original base, preservation work will cover the structure entirely, with Hayasaka saying it is expected to reopen to the public in 2033.