Japan · Iwate · Morioka
Uchimaru, Morioka — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Uchimaru is the government quarter of Morioka, laid out inside the outer enclosure of Morioka castle and now holding the prefectural office and city hall.
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Where to stay in Uchimaru
How the choice of base plays out on the ground.
This is a district that empties at night. The Iwate prefectural office, the Morioka city hall, the district court and the prefectural police headquarters all stand here, so the daytime numbers are large and the housing is thin. Morioka castle takes the southern end.
The Morioka Castle Site Park and the Morioka History and Culture Museum fill it, with offices to the north and restaurants between. No railway runs through the district.
About Uchimaru
What are the main landmarks in Uchimaru?
Morioka castle is the reason the district exists. Its site park and the History and Culture Museum occupy the southern part of Uchimaru, with Sakurayama shrine beside them. A separate enclosure was built in 1636.
Nanbu Shigenao raised it inside Uchimaru and called it the Goshinmaru. Three gates controlled the way in. The Nakanohashi gate stood to the east, the Ote gate to the north and the Hikage gate to the west, each with its guardhouse, so the block was cut off from the merchant quarters around it.
What is the history of Uchimaru?
Uchimaru was rocky ground called Ishiai. Nanbu Nobunaga took it in the Kenmu era, and the site of the Yoshinobu-kan, the house of his senior retainer Fukushi Yoshinobu, is still there. The name meant the outer enclosure.
It described the ward next to the north of the castle's inner moat, an area not quite the same as the modern district, ringed on almost every side by moat and embankment. Rank decided who lived there. The block was the residential ground of the Nanbu family and of senior retainers holding six hundred koku or more, and commoners could not pass the guardhouses.
Meiji brought the domain to an end in its fourth year. The embankments and moats of the outer enclosure were pulled down, ordinary people could come and go, and the prefectural office was set up on the site of the Hirokoji palace. Institutions arrived one after another.
A court branch, a police station, a medical school and a normal school came in 1876, the district office in 1879, a middle school in 1880 and the city hall in 1889.
Where is Uchimaru?
Uchimaru lies in the west of Morioka, bordering Hon-cho-dori to the north, Konyacho and Nakanohashicho to the east, Sakanacho to the south-east and Chuo-dori to the west.
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Another area in Morioka
Updated September 2026