About 1,800 people in northern Japan have helped move a 360-tonne castle more than two metres by hand as part of a major preservation project.

Rotating teams pulled on 30-metre ropes attached to the Hirosaki Castle keep in Aomori prefecture, moving it 1.13m on Saturday and another 1.09m on Sunday.

The keep – a fortified tower within a castle – had been shifted from its original position in 2015 so workers could repair a castle wall damaged by a major earthquake.

Rather than dismantling the nationally designated “cultural property”, officials used hikiya, an ancient Japanese technique in which buildings are placed on rollers or rails and moved intact. The wall has now been rebuilt, with all 2,185 stones returned to their original positions.

Once used mainly to make way for urban development, road widening and other construction projects, hikiya has increasingly been used to preserve historic buildings in Japan that might otherwise have to be dismantled or destroyed.

“We had about 8,000 applications for the 1,800 slots over the last two days, roughly four times oversubscribed, so not everyone could participate,” Kensuke Hayasaka, head of the parks and green spaces division at Hirosaki City, was quoted as saying by the Guardian.

“Not only from the city, but from across Japan and overseas; a fair number from south-east Asia and from Europe and North America.”

Around 4,100 people were expected to help move the keep a total of 5m by hand this month, while machinery will complete the remaining 73m.