Those broken stone columns are lying on a site that exists because of an earthquake. In 1619 one flattened Mugishima Castle, a kilometre south of here. The lord left that ground, asked Edo for permission, and rebuilt on this spot. Yatsushiro Castle was finished in 1622. The Tokugawa shoguns who ran Japan had already banned every domain from keeping more than one castle. Kumamoto held a rare exemption for two. When the quake took Mugishima, that exemption moved to the new site, which is why Yatsushiro was built at all. Its walls were cut from limestone, pale enough that people called it White Egret Castle. Lightning burned the main keep down in 1672 and nobody rebuilt it. Stone walls here came down in the 2016 quakes as well. A short walk from the castle grounds, Shohinken, a tea house and garden built in 1688 and made a protected national landmark in 2002, collapsed on the same afternoon. At least 18 people have died across the region, and crews were still digging on Wednesday. The original post says shindo 7, and the translation turns that into magnitude. Shindo measures how hard the ground shook in one particular spot, while magnitude measures how much energy the fault let go. Yatsushiro read 6-upper, one step below the top. The full 7 landed at Uki and Hikawa, closer to the epicentre, and Kumamoto Prefecture has now hit that top reading three times in a decade. About 40 kilometres north, Kumamoto Castle lost stone walls at 28 separate points. It was still being rebuilt from 2016, when 517 wall faces cracked, bulged or slipped, close to 30 percent of its stonework and about three football pitches worth. Masons number each stone and set it back where it came from. The city is aiming to finish in 2052. Ground here had been quiet for thousands of years. Japan's national fault database gave it a 0.5 to 2 percent chance of a big rupture in the next 30 years. The fault that broke Kumamoto in 2016 was rated under 1 percent. In Japan, that put it near the top of the national watch list.