Kumamoto Castle suffered a great deal of damage due to a large earthquake that struck in April 2016. Its castle keeps, turrets and stone walls were damaged and destroyed. Obayashi has made every effort to restore the castle. We revived the castle to how it was before the earthquake in April 2021. We have now completed a video tracing the path of that.

Kumamoto Castle has a high value as a cultural property. At the same time, it provides emotional support to the citizens of the city and prefecture of Kumamoto. We aimed to restore the castle as soon as possible after the earthquake. Under that aim, we began work on emergency measures to prevent the collapse of the Iidamaru Five-story Turret in June 2016. We then started work to restore the main keep and aseismic reinforcement work in April 2017. After that, we worked to restore the small keep. We restored the exterior and stone walls one-by-one while referring to photographs provided by many people in addition to historical materials.

We also introduce in the video the Cross Damper vibration control device and Guri-Grid® stone wall reinforcement technology that we developed to restore the internal and external structures of Kumamoto Castle even more robustly and flexibly. You can get a glimpse of the strength of Kumamoto Castle that it is not possible to see from the outside. Please take a look at the combination of the latest technologies and traditional techniques and the fruits of the desire to pass on a castle to future generations with pride.

You can watch a video of the revived Kumamoto Castle.

(Video playback time: 11minutes 46seconds)