Hagi Castle Town

Hagi was in the 1850s the political centre of one of Japan's influential and progressive feudal clans and Mori, the lord, had responsibility for the protection of the major sea route through the Shimonoseki Straits, between Honshu and Kyushu islands. Following Perry's arrival in Edo, the clan rapidly responded to the calls for the defense of the nation. The clan gathered what information on Western technology it could from other clans such as Saga, learnt mainly from Dutch textbooks, and entered into a period of trial-and-error development of Western-style metal processing and ship building.

Hagi Castle Town has a traditional hierarchically structured urban landscape of the feudal Tokugawa period, including houses of samurai and artisans, where much of the clan policy was developed and implemented, including the ceremoniously dismantled castle site of the last of the feudal lords. Castle Town provides the essential context for the birth of Japanese industrialism, without which the speed and extraordinary nature of Japanese industrialization would be difficult to comprehend.