East Fukui · OnoNo.1080★★Open in map →

Echizen Ono Castle

historyOff the trail — and worth it

A reconstructed keep on a wooded hill above a mountain-basin castle town in eastern Fukui. No road reaches the top, so every visitor climbs. In the colder months the basin below fills with cloud and the hill becomes an island.

FromFukui Station
~55 minJR Kuzuryu Line, 8 a day
Get off atEchizen-Ono Station (JR Kuzuryu Line)
From there
Echizen Ono Castle

Directions ↗

The sweet spot

Within Fukui this is a well-known castle, and the autumn cloud draws photographers to the viewpoint opposite. What thins the crowd is the timetable. The line up the valley runs only a handful of times a day, so most people come by car in the middle of the day, and the early hill belongs to whoever walked up.

Where it is

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What to look for — in walking order

Shichiken streetthe old merchant street through the castle town, on the line between station and hill
The trailheads on Kameyamafootpaths ringing the wooded hill, since nothing on wheels goes up to the keep
Nozura-zumi wallswarring-states walling of uncut stone, laid rough and fast for defence
Musha-noboria stepped stone climb inside the main enclosure, cut for defenders to run up
The keepa two-tiered tower of four floors on the old base, open to the view over the basin

How to actually get there

Fukui Station → Echizen-Ono Station (JR Kuzuryu Line, about 55 minutes; only eight departures a day).
Echizen-Ono Station → the foot of Kameyama (walk west through the old castle town and Shichiken street).
Climb from a trailhead to the main enclosure, passing the uncut-stone walls and the Musha-nobori steps.
On a cloud morning, go to Inuyama on the far side of the valley before first light instead.

JR Kuzuryu Line from Fukui Station: Fukui Station →(JR Kuzuryu Line, about 55 minutes)→ Echizen-Ono Station. There are only eight departures a day on this stretch, so fix your train before you leave Fukui rather than after you arrive. From the station the castle hill lies a little over a kilometre west, on the far side of the old town.
Back to Fukui: Return trains are as thin as the outbound ones and finish early in the evening, so read the platform timetable when you arrive, not when you want to leave. Keifuku bus route 55 runs the same corridor and its timetable is set to fill the gaps in the train one, which makes it the usual fallback.

Directions from my location (Google Maps) ↗

About the place

Ono lies in a flat basin in eastern Fukui, closed in on every side by mountains. Kameyama, the wooded hill at the western edge of the town, rises about 249 metres, and the castle stands on top of it. Four footpaths climb the hill and no vehicle reaches the keep, so everyone arrives the same way. Near the summit the stone walls are the original ones, stacked from rough uncut rock in the warring-states period. The wooden tower above them is a modern reconstruction, and the old castle town lies straight below, close enough to walk through on the way up.

How to enjoy it

The cloud forms before dawn and is usually gone by nine in the morning, which is also when the keep opens, so the two do not fit into a single visit. For the cloud you go instead to Inuyama, the wooded hill about a kilometre west of the castle, setting out in the dark and climbing fifteen to twenty minutes from the road. It appears between October and the end of April, most often in November, after a warm damp day followed by a cold and windless night.

Background & history

In 1575 Oda Nobunaga handed two-thirds of the Ono district to his retainer Kanamori Nagachika. Nagachika began work on Kameyama the following year and spent four years on it. The tower standing there now is not his. It was rebuilt in 1968 with a donation from Hagiwara Sadashi, a descendant of the old warrior households, and it is a concrete reconstruction rather than a restoration. The genuinely old part of the castle is the stone base beneath it, which is sixteenth-century work.

Before you go

Cash: The hill, its paths and the park around the ruins cost nothing. The keep itself is ticketed, and the town's own published figure at the time of checking was 400 yen for adults and free for children up to junior high school. Carry cash; this is a small mountain town.
Good to know: The keep is shut from the start of December to the end of March, when snow lies deep here. Even in season there is no lighting on the hill, so the last climb of the day should start well before closing time.
Another way: Keifuku bus route 55 leaves from bay 5 of the west exit terminal at Fukui Station and reaches the Ono-Rokken stop in the old town in about an hour and ten minutes, which sets you down closer to the castle than the railway station does.
After you get off: From Echizen-Ono Station, walk west through the old town to the foot of Kameyama, where the paths up begin. The climb from a trailhead to the keep takes about twenty minutes.