The castle is UNESCO World Heritage and spectacular. The half-built hotel beside it has a story that locals tell in a particular tone of voice.
You come up the path and the castle walls appear — curved limestone, laid in the 15th century, still holding a hillside together with no mortar.
You look east and there is the East China Sea. You look uphill and there is a concrete building with no windows, no doors and trees growing out of the third floor.
Your guide, if you have one, will mention it briefly and then change the subject with a small smile that contains an entire local history.
Nakagusuku Castle is the real reason to come. Built in stages through the 14th and 15th centuries and associated with the lord Gosamaru, it has some of the finest surviving stonework in the Ryukyu Islands — three styles of wall construction, curved and fitted so precisely that Commodore Perry's expedition wrote admiringly about it in 1853. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site, properly maintained, with a visitor entrance and a view in every direction.
Directly uphill sits the Nakagusuku Kōgen Hotel, begun around 1972 and never finished. Construction stopped. The official account involves permits, money and a change of circumstances.
The local account is different. The site sits near land regarded as sacred — Okinawa takes its 御嶽 (utaki) seriously, and always has — and the story goes that workers refused to continue after a series of accidents. Whether you take that literally or not, it has been told long enough to be part of the place, and it is the reason the building has been photographed for fifty years.
Access to the hotel structure has changed repeatedly: fenced, unfenced, patrolled, ignored. The honest advice is to look at it, photograph it from outside, and not enter. It is a fifty-year-old unfinished concrete shell with no maintenance history, and entry is restricted.
Combine it with the castle, which is legal, open, air-conditioned at the entrance, and genuinely one of the most impressive things in Okinawa.
Two ruins on one hillside. One is 600 years old, immaculately maintained, and protected by international treaty. The other is 50 years old and falling apart faster. The old one is in better condition than the new one — because it was built by people who expected it to outlive them, and the other was built by people who expected a return by 1975.
- Nakagusuku Castle appears in Commodore Perry's expedition records from 1853, whose surveyors were impressed by the stonework quality.
- Okinawa's castles (gusuku) are collectively a UNESCO World Heritage site, inscribed in 2000.
- 御嶽 (utaki) are sacred sites in the Ryukyuan religion, often unmarked and frequently just a grove or a rock. Many are still actively used. If a site is roped off, that is why.
Getting there
About 45 minutes by car from Naha. Nakagusuku Castle has parking and a proper visitor entrance with a shuttle up the hill. The hotel structure is immediately uphill and visible from the castle grounds.