Hirosaki Castle has no wheels or motors.
This weekend, in Aomori Prefecture, in northern Japan, groups of 80 people took turns pulling 30-meter ropes and dragging the castle tower along rails: a 360-ton structure built in 1810. To the chant of “so-re, so-re”, they managed to move it 1,13 meters on Saturday and 1,09 meters on Sunday. The tower had been moved to a temporary platform in 2015 to repair walls damaged by an earthquake, and is now returning, centimeter by centimeter, to its original location.
Motoharu Nakata, 61, traveled from Hiroshima to take part; the same person had already done so 11 years earlier, during the previous relocation. There were nearly 8.000 applications from around the world for just 1.800 spots. The manual effort will continue through the end of August, and then machinery will complete the 78-meter journey by the end of the year.