Japan's 100 Famous Castles & gojoin: the stamp-rally and seal guide

Two different things get tangled together whenever travellers talk about "castle stamps" in Japan. One is the 100 Famous Castles stamp rally — a free ink stamp you press into an official book at each castle. The other is gojoin (御城印), a paid paper seal-sheet you buy as a souvenir. They look related but are run by different people, cost different amounts, and exist for different reasons. This guide keeps them strictly apart, walks through both official "100 Castles" lists (200 castles in total), and ends at the strongest hook of all: the twelve castles that still have a genuine pre-modern keep.

The two official "100 Famous Castles" lists (200 in total)

The 100 Famous Castles of Japan (日本100名城) is a list selected by the Japan Castle Association (公益財団法人日本城郭協会). It was certified on 6 April 2006 — "Castle Day" (城の日), a play on the numbers 4-6 reading like shiro (城). A decade later the Association added a second tier, the Continued 100 Famous Castles (続日本100名城), announced in 2017. Together they make 200 castles, and the two lists between them touch all 47 prefectures.

An important point that trips up first-timers: these castles were chosen for heritage, historical, and regional value — not for being the prettiest. Several of Japan's most photogenic, tourist-famous castles share the list with quiet hilltop stone foundations that most visitors would walk past. The "Continued 100" was created partly to recognise sites that lost out narrowly in 2006 and to spread coverage more evenly across the country.

How the stamp rally works

The official stamp rally turns visiting all 200 castles into a long, structured collecting game. The first-100 rally launched on 2 June 2007; the continued-100 rally followed in 2018. The mechanics are the same for both:

• Get the official stamp book. It is sold bundled with the Association's official guidebook (published by Gakken / One Publishing). The book has a numbered page for each castle.
• Press the free stamp at each castle. Every site has a designated FREE ink stamp — usually at the ticket office, management building, or a nearby information desk. You press it into the matching page yourself. There is no charge for the stamp.
• Complete the list, then mail the book in. Once all 100 stamps of a list are collected, you send the book to the Japan Castle Association. They add a completion seal (登城完了印) and assign you a completion ranking number. The two lists complete separately, so you can finish the first 100 without touching the continued 100.

The Association is explicit about the spirit of the rally: it is meant to encourage people to actually visit "on foot" and keep the book as a record of the journey — not simply to amass stamps. In other words, the stamp is a memento of a real visit, not the point in itself.

Gojoin (御城印) — a separate, paid collectible

This is where most confusion starts. A gojoin is not the rally stamp. It is a paper seal-sheet sold at a castle — the castle equivalent of the temple and shrine goshuin. Each one is typically printed on washi paper with the castle's name, the date, and the crests (kamon) of the lords who held it, then handed to you in an envelope for payment. The usual price is around ¥300, though limited and seasonal editions can run higher (roughly ¥200 to ¥1,000+).

The difference from a temple/shrine goshuin is worth keeping straight: a goshuin is usually brush-written by hand on the spot and "awarded" as a record of worship, whereas a gojoin is usually pre-printed and "purchased" as a souvenir. They share the look and the collecting instinct, but the gojoin is a commercial keepsake, not a religious record.

The format is fairly young. Matsumoto Castle is credited with starting a "tower-visit commemorative seal" around 1990, but gojoin only became a nationwide craze after 2019, riding the broader goshuin boom. Because each castle or local body issues its own, the total count moves constantly — so it is honest to say gojoin are now sold at thousands of castles and castle-related sites rather than to quote a hard number that will be wrong by next season.

The 12 original surviving keeps (the real hook)

Here is the fact that reframes a whole castle trip: of the dozens of castle keeps you can visit, only twelve still have an original wooden keep (現存天守) that predates the Meiji era. Everything else you climb is a later rebuild. Five of the twelve are designated National Treasures; the other seven are Important Cultural Properties. If you only chase one collection in Japan, make it these.

The five National Treasure keeps are Himeji, Matsumoto, Inuyama, Hikone, and Matsue — Matsue was the most recent, upgraded from Important Cultural Property to National Treasure on 5 July 2015. Four of the twelve sit in Shikoku alone, which makes that island the densest "original keep" itinerary in the country.

Rally stamp vs gojoin, side by side

If you remember nothing else, remember this table. The two systems coexist at many castles, which is exactly why people mix them up.

Which castles are "real" vs reconstructions

Plenty of the biggest, most famous castles on the 100 lists are not original. Osaka, Nagoya, Kumamoto, Hiroshima, and Okayama are all twentieth-century concrete reconstructions — often rebuilt on the original stone bases (石垣), which are themselves genuinely old, but the towers you climb are modern. They are absolutely worth visiting; just don't call them "original keeps."

One access note that changes itineraries: Nagoya Castle's concrete keep has been closed since 2018 while the city plans a wooden rebuild, so you may only be able to admire it from outside. Castle access and works change often, so confirm before you build a day around any single keep.

The Japanese you'll actually use

Castle-hopping takes you to ticket windows and small-town information desks where a little vocabulary smooths everything — especially when you want to ask whether a place sells a gojoin or has the rally stamp.

Want these to stick? The free JLPT battle quiz drills travel and culture vocabulary like this with spaced repetition.