Goryōkaku is a star fort in the Japanese city of Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido. The fortress was completed in 1866. It was the main headquarters of the short-lived Republic of Ezo. Goryōkaku was designed in 1855 by Takeda Ayasaburō, a scholar of Dutch. He studied the fortified cities of Europe in the early modern period to design a fort that could …Goryōkaku is a star fort in the Japanese city of Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido. The fortress was completed in 1866. It was the main headquarters of the short-lived Republic of Ezo. Goryōkaku was designed in 1855 by Takeda Ayasaburō, a scholar of Dutch. He studied the fortified cities of Europe in the early modern period to design a fort that could protect against battles using guns and cannons. It took nearly seven years for the construction. The fortress was completed in 1866, two years before the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate. It is shaped like a five-pointed star. This allowed for greater numbers of gun emplacements on its walls than a traditional Japanese fortress, and reduced the number of blind spots where a cannon could not fire.
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