Experiences – Life – Inspiration 🇨🇭🇯🇵

Last weekend, my wife and I visited Ogaki Castle.

We did not plan this visit because we are particularly knowledgeable about Japanese history. We went because we had been watching the Taiga drama Ieyasu. What Will You Do? and it slowly planted a seed of curiosity in us.

For a long time, Japanese history felt very abstract to me. Too many names. Too many places. Too many events that did not quite connect into a picture in my mind. I could recognize famous figures like Tokugawa Ieyasu or Oda Nobunaga, but they floated somewhere in a vague mental space, detached from the land I actually live on.

The Taiga drama did not suddenly turn me into a historian. I know very well that such series take liberties and simplify things. But it did something much more important for me.

It gave me a story to hold on to.

Suddenly, these names were no longer just names. They became characters in a long, messy, human struggle for power, survival, and order. And once that happened, something else started to change as well.

When we stood in front of Ogaki Castle and read the information boards, the words did not just describe events anymore. They pointed to something that had actually unfolded right there, on that ground. The castle was no longer just a reconstructed building. It was a place where decisions were made, where people waited, hoped, feared, and fought.