An Earthquake Has Brought Down Kumamoto Castle’s Walls Again

An Earthquake Has Brought Down Kumamoto Castle’s Walls Again

What the repeated fall of Kumamoto Castle teaches us about mujō — and why impermanence is a quiet instruction to rebuild.

In October 2024 I stood at the foot of Kumamoto Castle and looked up at its stone walls. Some had been rebuilt. Others still lay where the 2016 earthquake had thrown them — great blocks of cut stone tumbled into heaps, roped off, waiting.

I had heard why the work was slow. The restorers were not simply pouring new walls. They were returning each stone to the exact place it had occupied for four centuries, numbering them, studying old photographs, fitting them back like the pieces of an enormous and patient puzzle. A wall built this way cannot be hurried; the full restoration has been projected to take decades.

Standing there, I found I did not mind the slowness. The rebuilt sections told me the rest would follow. Stone by stone, year by year, the castle would come back. Before I left I gave ten thousand yen to the city’s official restoration fund. A small sum against a project of that size — I knew that. But you give anyway, because you want to belong to what you are hoping for.

On the afternoon of 28 July 2026, an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 struck Kumamoto. The ground shook at its most violent level — the maximum on Japan’s seismic intensity scale — in the towns of Uki and Hikawa. And the walls of Kumamoto Castle came down again. The city counted twenty-seven collapses that night, and closed the castle’s gates.

I never imagined that in my own lifetime I would watch the stones of Kumamoto fall a second time.

I had been waiting for that castle. I feel, if I am honest, a plain and almost childish disappointment — the disappointment of a person who was promised nothing and hoped anyway.

No one to blame

An earthquake takes everything at once. A house, a lifetime’s savings, and with bad luck a life — gone between one breath and the next. As I write this, the full extent in Kumamoto is still unknown, and there are people who did not come home. I think of them, and of everyone in the prefecture struck twice inside a decade, and my chest tightens.

Here is the strange thing about that grief. When a person harms you, there is someone to blame, someone to be angry at, someone who might have chosen otherwise. A natural disaster gives you no one. The fault line did not decide. The earth holds no intention toward us at all — and that absence of intention is exactly what we mean when we call nature merciless. It is rifujin（理不尽）: unreasonable, unfair, and yet not unjust as cruelty is unjust, because injustice needs someone to commit it.

The older Japanese feeling for this is unsentimental. The mountain gives you clean water; the same mountain shrugs and buries a village. It is one mountain, one kami. Nothing up there is watching over you. This is not a comforting idea, but it is an honest one, and it clears away the question that can eat a grieving person alive — whose fault was this? No one’s. The ground simply moved.

What is left is us

I have lived long enough now to have watched this cycle more than once. In 1995 I was living in the heart of Kobe when the Hanshin earthquake killed thousands on a winter morning; my family came through it, but our home did not — it was destroyed. The Noto Peninsula was struck at this same maximum intensity on New Year’s Day 2024. And now Kumamoto, twice in ten years. Each time the same unbearable arithmetic: everything lost in seconds, then the slow years of setting it back.

You do not rebuild because you have been promised the ground will hold. You rebuild because rebuilding is the human answer to a catastrophe that has no answer.

There is no guarantee in it. The people of Kumamoto rebuilt after 2016, and the earth broke their work anyway. They will rebuild again, knowing the fault still runs beneath them, knowing this may not be the last time. To an outsider that can look like foolishness, or like denial. I have come to think it is closer to dignity — a refusal to let an indifferent universe have the last word about how a person lives.

I suspect this is one of the things that living on these islands has done to us over the centuries. When the ground itself cannot be trusted, you stop expecting permanence and begin to honor continuity instead — the carrying of something forward, again and again, rather than the thing standing untouched forever. The impermanence the Japanese call mujō（無常）is not only a wistful idea about falling cherry blossoms. It is also, quietly, a set of instructions: what falls can be raised; what is raised will fall; raise it again. A castle rebuilt one numbered stone at a time, on a fault everyone knows is still alive, is not naïveté. It is that instruction, made visible.

The treasures of this world

I love old buildings — not only Japan’s castles but the temples of Greece and the towers of Angkor Wat. They are among the treasures of this world. Near my apartment stands Osaka Castle, and I understand what such a place becomes for the people who grew up in its shadow: not a tourist site but a landmark of the heart, a fixed point they have looked toward their whole lives. When one falls, the loss is not only architectural. Something in a community’s memory loses its footing.

This is why people give — and why so many did. After 2016, donations poured toward Kumamoto, many of them through furusato nōzei（ふるさと納税）, the system that lets a taxpayer send part of their taxes to a region of their own choosing. Eiichiro Oda — the Kumamoto-born creator of One Piece, the best-selling manga read around the world — quietly gave eight hundred million yen under a pen name, wanting no credit; the gift surfaced only in 2018, and only because a controversy over how the money was spent forced his hand. My own ten thousand yen was nothing beside his, and beside the scale of the ruin it was nothing at all. But the amount was never the point. What mattered was the act, and that so many people chose to perform it. You give to a restoration as you set a single stone — not because your one stone finishes the wall, but because the wall is a thing many hands have agreed to keep.

Enough to be going on with

Nature will not learn mercy. The fault beneath Kumamoto will not move aside for our sake, and somewhere a future earthquake is already certain, only waiting for its date. None of that is in our hands.

What is in our hands is smaller and more stubborn: to prepare for the next one, to refuse to break, and to stand a little closer to the people the earth has just emptied out. I will wait for Kumamoto Castle again. I know now that its walls may fall a third time, and a fourth. And I know that when they do, someone will kneel in the rubble, lift a numbered stone, and begin to set it back where it belongs.

That is not a promise of anything. It is only what we do — and it is, I have come to believe, enough to be going on with.

If this piece speaks to you, you may want its companion — a reflection on readiness itself, on what Zen and the samurai understood about facing what cannot be prevented: Before the Ground Moves: What Zen and the Samurai Knew About Preparing for Disaster.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own — shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.