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【Kasama Castle Ruins (the castle's turret and gate)】

Kasama Castle was a mountaintop castle on the summit of Mt. Sashiro, which is said to have been built by Kasama Tokitomo in 1219. The Kasama clan had governed the Kasama district (areas in and around what is now Kasama City in Ibaraki Prefecture) for over roughly 380 years (or 18 generations), up to the late Warring States period (1507 - 1603). The Kasama clan was destroyed by the Utsunomiya clan, because they had not participated in the Siege of Odawara, a military campaign in 1590 led by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the ruler of Japan at that time.
In the Edo period (1603 - 1868), lords of the Kasama domain, including Sadanao Makino, the 8th lord of the domain, protected potters and pottery studios such as the Kuno-Tōen Pottery Studio. They aided the development of the pottery industry in Kasama by such acts as, for example, creating the domain's official pottery studios system. The turret of the castle was designated a tangible cultural property by the prefectural government and the gate was named a tangible cultural property by the Kasama City government.