Location made Matsusaka. Sitting on the western shore of Ise Bay at the center of old Ise Province, the castle controlled a junction where roads from Iga, Yamato, and Kii provinces met the pilgrim route to Ise Grand Shrine. That traffic fed a castle town that grew wealthy on trade. Merchants from Matsusaka became famous across Japan for their commercial reach, and the town's most consequential son was the founder of Mitsui -- the trading house that would grow into one of the largest business conglomerates in modern Japanese history. The castle may have been a military stronghold, but the money flowing through its gates shaped the region's identity far more than any garrison.

Ujisato completed construction with startling speed, conscripting stones from sacred sites to build defensive walls that were unusual for their era. While most Sengoku-period castles relied on earthen embankments, Matsusaka's enclosures were faced almost entirely in stone across three terraced layers. The honmaru at the summit held a three-story, five-floor tenshu tower capped with gold roof tiles, flanked by yagura watchtowers. The completed fortress featured two concentric moats and a layout compact enough to defend -- the core measured roughly 200 meters square -- yet imposing enough to announce Ujisato's authority. After the 1590 Battle of Odawara, the Gamo clan was rewarded with the much larger domain of Aizu-Wakamatsu, and Matsusaka passed through a rapid succession of lords: the Hattori, purged in 1595, then the Furuta, who held the castle through the chaos of the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.

In 1619, the Furuta clan was transferred out and Matsusaka Domain was abolished entirely. Its lands were absorbed into the vast Kishu Domain of the Kishu-Tokugawa clan, based in distant Wakayama. Under the shogunate's strict "one domain, one castle" policy, Matsusaka should have been demolished. Instead, it survived as something rare in Tokugawa Japan: a secondary administrative center, managing 179,000 koku of revenue from southern Ise Province. The castle had no resident lord, only bureaucrats. Then, in 1644, a typhoon destroyed the tenshu tower. No one rebuilt it. By 1794, a modest jin'ya fortified residence served the site's administrative functions. When fire gutted the second bailey's palace in 1877, and the remaining buildings were pulled down in 1881, only a single rice warehouse was left standing.

The walls endured. Archaeologists working on a massive restoration project between 1988 and 2003 discovered that Matsusaka's stonework shared construction techniques with Azuchi Castle, Oda Nobunaga's legendary lakeside fortress -- a connection that traces back through Ujisato, who had served Nobunaga before entering Hideyoshi's service. In 1982, local residents vetoed a proposal to reconstruct the tenshu, choosing to preserve the ruins as they were rather than build a concrete replica. That decision left the terraced stone walls as the castle's primary monument: massive, weathered, and unadorned. Today the grounds hold Matsusaka's city hall, a local history museum, and the Motoori Norinaga Memorial Hall, honoring the 18th-century scholar of Japanese classical literature who spent his life in Matsusaka. In 2006, the Japan Castle Foundation named the ruins one of the 100 Fine Castles of Japan. The site is a 15-minute walk from Matsusaka Station.