The Castle Town of Yokote

Yokote Castle's hilltop observatory, built in 1965, looks out toward Mt. Chokai and across the city. The castle site dates to the late sixteenth century, when the Onodera family governed the town. After the Onodera fell out of favor with the Tokugawa shogunate in the early seventeenth century, control passed to the Satake family, who managed the castle through a high-ranking vassal while they themselves lived in nearby Kubota. Development during the century expanded the town on both sides of the Yokote River, with samurai quarters on one bank and merchants on the other. The castle was destroyed in the 1868 Boshin War, and the grounds became a park in 1902.