Japanese castle

Japan, a castle visit, or a story set in samurai times.

In travel chat it is literal: "🏯 tomorrow, then ramen" means a castle is on the itinerary, and in a holiday caption it labels the photo. Because the shape is so recognisably Japanese, people also use it as shorthand for the whole country alongside 🗾, 🍣 or 🌸, especially when planning or dreaming about a trip.

The other big use is historical. Fans of samurai films, anime, novels and video games set in feudal Japan drop 🏯 to set the scene, often next to ⚔️ or 🎌. History accounts use it for anything about the shoguns, the warring-states era or the lords who ruled from these towers. On its own it carries no mood; the words around it tell you whether the castle is a real place you can visit or the backdrop of a story.

What is the building in 🏯?

The main tower of a Japanese fortress, called a tenshu.

Japanese castles are not one building but a walled complex of moats, gates, stone ramparts and courtyards. At its heart stands the tenshu, a wooden tower several storeys high on a sloping stone base, with white plaster walls and tiers of grey tiled roofs that curve up at the corners. On the top ridge sit a pair of shachihoko, mythical tiger-headed fish believed to guard against fire. That tower is what the emoji draws.

Most of them went up in a burst between the 1570s and the 1610s, when warlords were fighting to unify Japan and then settling into two centuries of peace under the Tokugawa shoguns. A tenshu was a lookout and last line of defence, but above all a statement: the local lord, or daimyo, ruled from here, and the castle town that grew around the walls often became today's city, from Osaka to Nagoya to Kanazawa.

Few of the originals survive. Many were pulled down in the late 1800s when the samurai order was abolished, and more burned in the Second World War. The towers most tourists photograph, including Osaka's and Nagoya's, are twentieth-century reconstructions, often in concrete with lifts and museums inside. Only twelve castles still have their original tower, and Himeji, nicknamed the White Heron for its gleaming walls, is the grandest of them.