初代試作江戸城

About the First Prototype of Edo Castle

This was the starting point of my work and one of the earliest Japanese-style buildings I ever created. It remains the oldest surviving work in my collection.

It began during the era when the smartphone version of Minecraft was still known as “Minecraft: Pocket Edition.” I recreated an “Edo Castle made with Nanoblock” that I had seen online, using it as my survival base.

Before long, the castle Main Tower alone no longer felt sufficient, and the project continued to grow. I renovated the Main Tower and added turrets, moats, gates, and palace buildings, gradually expanding the scale of the castle.

Eventually, the entire site developed into a layout corresponding to the grounds of the present-day East Gardens of the Imperial Palace.

After completing the project, I moved the world from my smartphone to a PC. Fortunately, I had carefully preserved the world ever since, allowing the original appearance to survive to this day.

When I originally built the castle Main Tower, I remembered that I had not intended to create the entire castle grounds. For this article, I therefore went back through the world and carried out a fresh excavation and investigation.
As a result,
gates, moats, and the stone walls of turret platforms were discovered beneath the ground. The remains of the former castle Main Tower foundation also emerged, along with the outlines of the former Honmaru, Ninomaru, and Sannomaru areas arranged side by side.

The investigation revealed that the “First Prototype of Edo Castle” had gradually transformed through repeated expansions, eventually becoming a castle whose defensive structures corresponded to the layout of the present-day East Gardens of the Imperial Palace.

This project marked a turning point for me: I moved from simply “building my own castle as a survival base” to “recreating something that actually exists.” It remains the starting point of my approach to Japanese-style architecture today.

After this first stage, through which I learned the structure of Edo Castle, my next challenge became the recreation of an actual building as accurately as possible.

That challenge continued into the second stage, the “Second Prototype of Edo Castle,” which I created during my middle school years.