Hikone Castle Picked as Japan’s World Heritage Candidate

Tokyo, Sept. 3 (Jiji Press)–The Council for Cultural Affairs, which advises Japan’s culture minister, on Thursday selected Hikone Castle, located in the western prefecture of Shiga, as the country’s fiscal 2026 candidate for registration as a UNESCO World Heritage site. A nomination for the castle in the city of Hikone will be submitted to UNESCO by February 2028 after necessary domestic procedures such as discussions at meetings among related government agencies and ministries, and cabinet approval. Japan aims to achieve the castle’s inscription on the World Heritage list in 2028. Construction of the castle began in 1604 under the direction of the Tokugawa shogunate. It was completed some 20 years later. Its castle tower and other facilities are designated as national treasures. Hikone Castle was added in 1992 to Japan’s tentative list of candidate sites for future World Heritage registration. The Shiga prefectural and Hikone municipal governments aim for a single registration for Hikone Castle, emphasizing that it symbolizes the system of rule by daimyo feudal lords in the Edo period. In its preliminary evaluation in 2024, UNESCO’s International Council on Monuments and Sites, or ICOMOS, cited the possibility of Hikone Castle meeting the criteria for World Heritage inscription while pointing to a challenge as to whether the castle alone can fully explain the daimyo governance system. In August 2025, the Council for Cultural Affairs stopped short of selecting the castle as a World Heritage candidate, saying that further efforts were needed for its single nomination. The council then began considering whether to choose the castle after the local communities resubmitted a draft nomination in May this year. The council concluded that Hikone Castle could be recognized to have outstanding universal value that can explain the system of daimyo rule on its own while calling for the draft nomination to be amended in a way to help promote foreign experts’ understanding through the use of easier descriptions. The Japanese government will submit a provisional nomination of Hikone Castle to UNESCO by the end of this month. After the submission of a formal nomination and on-site research by ICOMOS, the World Heritage Committee is expected to examine at its 2028 meeting whether the castle should be inscribed on the World Heritage list. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]