The Shimazu: Four Hundred Years in the Same Province

Kagoshima, a garden with a volcano in it, and the factory a lord built in 1851

島津氏 · last checked 2026-10-26

Most of the houses on this site were moved. The Mori were cut down and shifted to the coast, the Uesugi marched from Echigo to Aizu to Yonezawa, the Date ended up two provinces from where they started.

The Shimazu stayed where they were from the 1190s until the domains were abolished in 1871. Nearly seven hundred years, in the same province, under the same volcano.

Part 1 — A castle that is a wall

Kagoshima’s castle tells you the whole political situation at a glance. The Shimazu built no keep and no tower: Tsurumaru is a low walled residence at the foot of a hill, because a house that had held its province for four centuries did not need to announce anything.

The stone still carries bullet marks from 1877, when the Satsuma Rebellion ended on the hill directly behind it. The great gate was rebuilt in 2020, which makes the oldest thing on the site the walls and the newest thing the most photographed.

Part 2 — The garden, and the factory behind it

Sengan-en is a villa garden of 1658 whose designers did something no European garden would attempt: they borrowed an active volcano. Sakurajima sits across the bay as the centrepiece, and the bay itself reads as the pond.

Beside it is the part that matters more. In 1851 Shimazu Nariakira — the man photographed above — built the Shuseikan, an industrial complex with a reverberatory furnace, a glassworks, a shipyard and experiments in photography, on his own initiative and his own domain’s money, a decade before the shogunate began doing anything comparable.

He is photographed because he was the one who paid for the cameras. The daguerreotype his retainers made of him in 1857 is one of the earliest photographs taken by Japanese in Japan, and the apparatus that produced it was built on the ground beside his garden.

Part 3 — The graves without a temple

Fukushoji was the Shimazu family temple for five centuries. In 1869 the new government’s anti-Buddhist campaign abolished it, and the buildings came down. The graves stayed. A school now stands on the temple site, and the heads of the house lie in a quiet cemetery behind it — which is a stranger experience than a temple would have been, and easy to walk past entirely.

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Part 4 — Fact and legend

Documented, and underrated: the industry came first. The Shuseikan was running in 1851. Perry arrived in 1853. The story that Japan industrialised because it was forced to is true at the national scale and false here, and Satsuma’s head start is a large part of why Satsuma mattered so much in the 1860s.

Documented: the retreat through the middle. At Sekigahara in 1600 the Shimazu contingent, trapped on the losing side, withdrew by charging straight through the enemy centre and out the other side. Of roughly a thousand men, some tens came home. This one is real, and the Shimazu had the astonishing good fortune to keep their province afterwards.

Retold: the UNESCO listing covers the garden. It does not. The 2015 World Heritage inscription covers Meiji industrial sites, and at Sengan-en that means the Shuseikan buildings and the works, not the villa or the garden. Guides run them together constantly.

Retold: that the castle is “ruins” because of the war. Tsurumaru burned in 1873, before any war touched it.

Before you go

Sengan-en is open 9:00 to 17:00 every day of the year and sits about forty minutes by bus from Kagoshima-Chuo. The combined ticket covers the garden and the Shuseikan museum; the price is not on the garden’s front page, so buy at the gate or online.

Tsurumaru is in the middle of town and free, with the prefectural museum inside the walls. The Fukushoji graves are a short bus ride north and are open ground.

Stay in the city. All three sites are here, and Kagoshima has sixty-five properties bookable in English — the second deepest list anywhere on this site. They are city hotels rather than ryokan: Kagoshima is a hot-spring town in the sense that the water is under the pavement, not in the sense that there is a village of inns to sleep in.

If you do want that, Myoken is about fifty minutes north toward Kirishima, with four inns bookable in English and no walkable access to any of them. It is a different day out, not an evening after this one.