FROZEN IN TIME! The ONLY Black Castle in Japan! | A visit to Matsumoto and its Castle

Hello everyone, we are in Matsumoto. We're going to explore this place for the next two days to do all the things that you can do in and around Matsumoto. But we're first going to dive immediately in the most famous thing to do here in Matsumoto and that is to explore its castle. Matsumoto, located in Nagano and with a population of only 250 000, it isn't a big city but it has one of the biggest attractions in the country. The place we are visiting now. One of Japan's prime historic castles, Matsumoto castle. It's unfortunate the weather is not that great but if you want to enter Matsumoto castle it will cost you 700 yen in terms of entrance fee and with that you enter the oldest surviving castle here in Japan. Dates back 429 years ago and it's one of the 12 original remaining castles that are still left here in this nation. And man, from the outside just how that's structured. Starting 429 years ago and then ended up in this beautiful building. The architecture is grand, it really is fabulous. Let's have a look inside as well how that would look like. The beautiful thing about Japan is that even when you enter these kind of places before you enter you remove your shoes and now we're in the castle itself. And this first floor the passage is a bit wider than you would see at the other floors later apparently because this is where the armory was stored, where soldiers would get ready. Full suit, they need to be able to run here through those hallways. The higher you get in the castle the more important people are around the place. So where the first floor was mainly used for storage of food, gunpowder and weapons, the fifth floor was a conference room for the executives of the castle. And the sixth floor located 22.1 meters above ground was used as the headquarters of the warlord if the castle was under attack. So that was a relatively quick but very nice visit to Matsumoto castle. It took me two hours to visit the place, reading all the signs and stuff. So if you would do it a little bit faster I think you can do it in an hour but like one and a half easily. This outer part where I'm walking in the moment that's just free to visit so that you can just explore freely by yourself. And I can imagine during cherry blossom season for example this would be very lovely to explore. But I'm still impressed like of course they in 1962 they start to like reconstruct or rebuild or re-fortify the place again. But that this was built or started 462 years ago and then over the course of this it turns out into this six floor castle. It's really impressive and I just love the architecture here. Reflection on the water giving that reflection of the castle. Would have been nice with sun that you get really that great reflection on there like that that thing. But yeah it's a great area to quickly hang out. We're now going into the other part of Matsumoto and see what else is there still here to explore. So the question remains what else is there to do in Matsumoto once you have visited the castle? Well honestly there aren't too many things to do in Matsumoto itself. But there is at least one other thing to visit. The other thing that's really nice to visit is Nawate street which is kind of an old looking street with a temple as well in there. But again what I don't really understand is like here there's still quite a lot of shops closed which it's 12 o'clock in the afternoon. Maybe because it's December time off season and this is more for the tourists. But again if you're here definitely worth checking out. So that might explain why some of the things are closed because there are also bars and restaurants located in these buildings and they open around 5 to 6 p.m. So yeah I'm not sure the shops might be closed by that time. So but it might be worth when you're if you stay in Matsumoto which I definitely would recommend if you stay at least stay for a night then you could check this out in the evening as well. Unfortunately I don't have the time to check out this street in the evening but this is what you can mainly do in Matsumoto itself. There are also some beautiful day trips you can do from Matsumoto and one of them that takes us into the mountains and some picturesque villages is something that we will be exploring in the next video.