Cohorts of the Damned

Pulling myself together again to continue with the holiday snaps, after going down to Kagoshima it was then a trip up to the city of Kumamoto. Kumamoto's history is a comparatively modern one ('modern' in a rather academic sense anyway), with the area having very little prominence before the installation of Katō Kiyomasa as the local daimyō  in 1588, who ordered the construction of Kumamoto Castle and established the city as his administrative hub. Kiyomasa's son Tadahiro was deprived of his lands in 1632 and replaced by Hosokawa Tadatoshi, whose line continued to rule until the abolition of the domain system in 1871. Six years later, large parts of the city, and much of the castle, were burned or flooded during a nearly two-month siege by the Satsuma rebels, but the garrison held out until relief arrived. Kumamoto latterly served as a regional military headquarters and was hit by a major bombing raid in 1945, and in April 2016 it was also badly struck by a series of e...