Himeji Castle

Listen to the gravel first. It crunches under every step as you climb toward the gate, and above you the walls rise in layer after layer of white. On a clear morning the plaster is so bright that it almost hurts to look at it. The roofs are dark grey tile, curved at the edges like the tips of folded wings. This is Himeji Castle, and for many people it is the clearest picture of what a Japanese castle looks like.

Locals call it Shirasagi-jo, the White Heron Castle. Stand still for a moment and you can see why. The main keep sits high on its hill with smaller towers gathered around it. The white walls and the swept-up roofs look like a bird about to lift off the ground. It is a gentle image for a building made for war, and that contrast follows you through the whole visit.

The hill under your feet has a long story of fortification. Records show that local lords built defences here as early as the fourteenth century. In the late sixteenth century, the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi held the site and built a castle with a three-storey keep. Hideyoshi was the man who brought most of Japan under one rule after more than a century of civil war. But the castle you see today belongs mainly to the next chapter.

After the decisive Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the new Tokugawa government gave this region to Ikeda Terumasa, a son-in-law of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Terumasa rebuilt the castle on a far grander scale. The great main keep was finished around 1609. Its position mattered. It guarded the western approaches to the Tokugawa heartland, and its sheer size was a message to any lord in the west who might be thinking of rebellion.

Here is the first surprise. This castle was never seriously attacked. It was designed for a siege that never came. Even so, every part of the approach is a trap. The paths twist and double back. Some routes that seem to lead toward the keep actually lead away from it. Gates are lettered in the old Japanese syllabary, and you will pass through several of them. An enemy army would have lost its way here, exposed to fire from above at every turn.

Look closely at the walls as you walk. You will see small openings shaped like circles, triangles and squares. These are loopholes for guns and arrows. Higher up, look for the overhanging sections of wall with openings in the floor. These are stone-dropping chutes, built so defenders could throw rocks or pour things down onto attackers at the base. They look decorative from a distance. Up close, their purpose is very plain.

Now the stone foundations. The great sloping walls are built from fitted stone, wide at the bottom and curving inward as they rise. Builders needed huge amounts of stone, and they took it wherever they could find it. Among the blocks there are reused pieces, including old stone coffins and lanterns. One famous stone is wrapped in wire mesh. Legend has it that an old woman gave her own millstone to Hideyoshi when he was short of stone, and people were so moved that they followed her example.

Another story lives inside these walls. Within the grounds is a well linked to Okiku, the heroine of a well-known ghost tale. In the story, a servant girl is falsely accused of losing one of a set of precious plates. She is thrown into a well, and at night her voice is heard counting the plates, one to nine, then breaking into tears. It is folklore, not history. Still, many visitors stop at the well and lower their voices without quite knowing why.

The second big surprise is that the castle is still standing at all. Many Japanese castles were pulled down in the late nineteenth century, when the new government saw them as relics of the old order. Others burned in the bombing raids of the Second World War. In 1945 much of the city of Himeji was destroyed by fire. The castle on its hill survived. Locals tell a story that a bomb landed on the top floor and failed to explode.

Inside the main keep, the mood changes. Shoes come off, and you climb in your socks on smooth, dark wooden floors. The stairs are steep, almost like ladders, and the ceilings are low in places. From outside you count five roofs, but inside there are more floors than that, because the structure hides levels between the roofs. Two massive wooden pillars run up through the heart of the keep and carry its weight. Put your hand near one and feel how wide it is.

The castle has been carefully looked after. A major restoration in the mid twentieth century took the keep apart and rebuilt it, and one of the great pillars was replaced. A second large repair project followed in the early twenty-first century, when craftsmen renewed the white plaster and the roof tiles. That is one reason the walls look so clean today. In 1993 the castle became one of Japan's first UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the United Nations list of places of outstanding value.

There is a softer side to the castle too. In the western enclosure, a long corridor once housed the women of the household. It is linked to Princess Sen, a granddaughter of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who lived here after her marriage to a local lord. Walk its length and look out through the windows. In spring the grounds fill with cherry blossom, and the pale pink trees stand against the white walls in a way that draws crowds from across Japan.

Before you leave, find one of the open courtyards and turn back toward the keep. Look at the roof ridges for the curved fish-shaped ornaments at each end. In old belief they were thought to protect a building from fire. Look at the layers of gables, some triangular, some curved, each one placed with care. Then listen again to the gravel, the voices of other visitors, perhaps a crow calling from the pine trees. Four centuries on, the white heron is still here, and today you have walked inside it.