Blog - Odawara Castle

Odawara Castle

Yesterday, despite the cloudy weather, we went down to Odawara, Kanagawa, mainly to visit the Odawara Castle. We took a Romance Car (1996 model EXE10) to get there. The Romance Car is a limited express train on Odakyū line which doesn't have much to do with its name except maybe that the paired seats don't have a central armrest. The route takes about a bit over an hour.

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Once we got there, we headed straight to the famous bread/pastry shop 守谷のパン (Moriya no pan: 2-2-2 Sakae-chō), where we bought a bunch of different kinds of breads and donuts. We walked through old streets in Oshare-yokochō where I took the picture below of a mess of cables.

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It was then about 12:30 so we went looking for something for lunch. We ended up at sushi restaurant はげ八鮨 (Hagehachizushi: 2-9-46 Sakae-chō) where we had their omakase-don which was a lot more than we expected. Odawara being located on the coast in the south of Kanagawa prefecture, the fish is very fresh and delicious. It was also a very good deal at ¥1155 for a bowl covered with about a dozen pieces of sashimi, tea, miso soup, a grilled fish side-dish, a piece of sweet potato, and coffee. We ended up very full! The bread we had eaten before didn't help though of course.

Then we walked towards the castle. In the court was being held a oden festival and an "antique market", really mostly a regular flea-market. Some stairways later we arrived at the castle. It was my first time at a Japanese castle, and I thought it looked a bit more simple than the European-style castles (the word "castle" does evoke these in my mind). Nevertheless it was quite large and the inside very vast. The Odawara Castle was created in (I think) the 12th century, and was in use until 1870 when it was abolished. It was destroyed in 1923 by earthquakes and fires and rebuilt in 1960. It has 4 floors of which the last one is an observatory.
These are the crests of two of the families that occupied the castle: Hōjō and Ōkubo.

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Last, at the souvenir shop, we only bought some water, but it's local water from Odawara. The bottle's design imitates a paper lantern, and it's made easy to shrink for recycling or you even to make it a smaller size when you've drank part of it so that it takes less space in your bag.

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