S P O T ／ SPOT-310

Lockheart Castle (Marble Village)

ロックハート城ろっくはーとじょう

Deep in the mountains of Gunma stands a genuine Scottish castle—not a replica, but the real Lockheart Castle, completed in 1829, dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt 9,000 kilometers from home. The improbable story began in 1987, when the actor Masahiko Tsugawa bought the decaying castle; in 1988 it was taken apart over seven months into some 4,000 numbered stones weighing 600 tons, then shipped to Japan via the Trans-Siberian Railway. A Numata stone company, Sampo, acquired it in 1992 and spent roughly 1.5 billion yen and 15,000 worker-shifts reassembling it, opening the site in 1993. Today the castle anchors a roughly 100,000-square-meter 'Marble Village,' where a stone church and other buildings compose an artificial medieval-European townscape. The spectacle is gloriously disorienting: an authentic old-world castle, exquisitely detailed yet wrenched from its context, presiding over a Japanese mountain village. It is a monument to bubble-era ambition—and a perennial favorite as a film and drama location.