Nijō Castle

Listen to the gravel first. It crunches under every step, pale and loose, as you pass through the great eastern gate. Ahead, white plaster walls rise above dark stone. Clipped pines lean over the paths. Somewhere beyond them, a wooden floor is waiting to sing. Welcome to Nijō Castle, in the heart of Kyoto. This is a castle that was never really built for war. It was built to send a message.

The message came from Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was the warlord who united Japan after more than a century of civil war. In the first years of the seventeenth century, he ordered this castle raised in the old imperial capital. The emperor lived here in Kyoto. The real power, however, now sat with the Tokugawa shoguns, the military rulers based far to the east in Edo, today's Tokyo. Nijō Castle was their Kyoto address, and a statement of who was in charge.

Look at the defences around you. There are two rings of moats and stone walls, one inside the other. The stones in the walls are fitted without mortar. Large blocks hold the corners. Smaller stones fill the faces between them. It looks fierce. Yet the shoguns rarely stayed here for long. They came on formal visits, received nobles and officials, and then returned to Edo. The walls were real, but much of their purpose was theatre.

Before you reach the palace, you pass the Karamon gate. Take a moment here. The gate is crowded with carvings, painted and gilded. There are cranes, pine trees, flowers and mythical creatures. It was restored in recent years, so the colours are bright again. Look closely at the crests on the metalwork. After the shoguns fell, the castle passed to the imperial family. In several places, the chrysanthemum crest of the emperor was set over the Tokugawa hollyhock crest.

Now the Ninomaru Palace. This is the heart of the castle, and it is a National Treasure of Japan. It is not one building but a chain of halls, joined diagonally, stepping back like a flock of birds in flight. The roofs are heavy and dark. The wood is plain cypress. You will remove your shoes before going in. Then, as you walk the long corridors in your socks, you will hear it. A soft chirping, rising from the floor itself.

These are the nightingale floors. Every step makes the boards squeak and twitter. The popular story says this was a clever alarm. No assassin could cross the palace in silence. It is a good tale, and guides love to tell it. Some historians suggest the sound began as a side effect of the clamps and nails under the boards, rubbing as the wood moves. Either way, the result is the same. Nobody walks through the Ninomaru Palace unheard.

Inside the halls, look at the sliding doors and walls. They are covered with paintings by artists of the Kano school, the official painters to the shogun's court. Gold leaf fills the backgrounds. Great pine trees spread their branches across several panels at once. Many of the paintings you see in the rooms today are careful reproductions. The originals are fragile and are kept in a separate storage and exhibition building, where some are shown on rotation.

In the first rooms, where visitors once waited, you will find tigers and leopards among bamboo. Look carefully at them. The painters had almost certainly never seen a living tiger. Japan had no tigers. The artists worked from skins and from older Chinese paintings. It is often said that the leopards were thought to be female tigers. The cats have a strange, almost friendly look. They were meant to impress, and perhaps to unsettle, anyone kept waiting here.

The rooms grow grander as you move deeper. Ceilings rise. Decoration becomes richer. This was deliberate. Your rank decided how far you could go. Ordinary visitors stopped early. Powerful lords went further. Only the most trusted reached the inner rooms. In the great audience hall, the floor of the shogun's section sits higher than the floor where the lords knelt. Even the height of the ground beneath you told you your place.

This same audience hall holds the castle's most important moment. In 1867, the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, gathered officials here. He announced that he would return political power to the emperor. It was the end of more than two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. The castle that Ieyasu built to show the shogun's strength became the place where that rule was formally handed back. Figures in the hall today recreate the scene.

Step outside again, and put your shoes back on. The Ninomaru Garden spreads beside the palace. A pond sits at its centre, with islands, carefully placed rocks and a small waterfall. The design is traditionally credited to Kobori Enshū, a celebrated tea master and garden designer of the early Edo period. The garden was made to be seen from the palace rooms, so try to view it from more than one side. The rocks change shape as you walk.

Here is something many visitors miss. Climb towards the inner moat and the Honmaru, the inner citadel. A tall main keep once stood here. Lightning struck it in the eighteenth century, and the fire destroyed it. It was never rebuilt. Today only its stone base remains. You can climb onto it. From the top, you look over pines, roofs and the low skyline of modern Kyoto. The castle's highest point is now an empty platform.

The palace inside the Honmaru has its own story. The original was lost to fire. The building you see was moved here in the late nineteenth century from the grounds of the imperial palace. Later, in 1939, the imperial family gave the whole castle to the city of Kyoto. In 1994, it joined other temples and shrines of the city on the UNESCO World Heritage list, as part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto.

As you walk back towards the gate, slow down a little. Listen to the gravel again. Notice the pines, trained for years into low, wide shapes. Notice how quiet it is inside these walls, though the city traffic runs just outside. The shoguns built this place to show power. What remains today is something gentler. Painted tigers. A garden of stones and water. And, somewhere behind you, a floor still singing under someone's feet.