Himeji Castle

Somewhere in the 1870s a man bought Himeji Castle at auction for the price of the roof tiles. The new Meiji government was busy dismantling the feudal order, and the hundreds of castles that had defined it were being sold off or torn down as embarrassing relics. The buyer's plan, as the story goes, was to strip the timber and tiles and sell them. Then he did the arithmetic. Pulling apart a six-storey wooden tower sitting on a hill was going to cost more than the salvage was worth. He walked away. Japan's most complete castle survived because demolishing it was a bad deal.

From A Hill Fort To A Machine

There has been something fortified on this hill since the 1330s, when the Akamatsu clan built a small stronghold. For two centuries the site changed hands and shape. In 1580, as Toyotomi Hideyoshi pushed west on his campaign to unify Japan, he made Himeji his base and put up a three-storey keep. But the castle you see now is a product of the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. Tokugawa Ieyasu won it, became master of the country, and installed his son-in-law Ikeda Terumasa at Himeji with one job: to be a wall against the old Toyotomi loyalists in the west.

Terumasa started in 1601 and finished in 1609. He tore down Hideyoshi's keep and replaced it with the present main tower, three smaller towers linked by corridors, more than eighty buildings in all, and a spiral of moats and baileys winding around the hill. The main keep rises about thirty-one metres from its stone base, forty-six metres from the ground. From outside it looks like five storeys; inside there are six plus a basement. The deception is deliberate. Everything here is deliberate.

The famous white plaster that earned the nickname Shirasagi-jo, the White Heron Castle, was not chosen for beauty. It is fireproofing, a thick coat over the timber. The grounds are a trap: gates are narrow, paths double back, and passing through one gate can leave you lower down than you started. The circular, triangular and square holes in the walls are for arrows and muskets. The hatches under the overhangs are for dropping stones. An attacker who crossed the moat would have to cover roughly a kilometre of twisting approach under fire before reaching the keep.

Never Tested

The strangest thing about this machine is that it never ran. Almost as soon as Himeji was finished, Japan settled into two and a half centuries of Tokugawa peace. The castle served as an administrative seat while lords came and went: the Ikeda, then the Honda, the Matsudaira, the Sakakibara, and from 1749 until the end of the feudal era the Sakai family. Not one arrow was ever fired from those loopholes in anger.

After the near-miss of the auction, an army officer named Nakamura Shigeto persuaded his superiors that the buildings should be kept, and a small stone monument beside the Hishi Gate remembers him for it. Of the hundreds of castles that once stood in Japan, only twelve still have their original main keep. Himeji is the largest of the twelve.

Then came 1945. On a night in early July, American bombers burned most of the city of Himeji. When the smoke cleared, the keep was still on its hill, its white walls blackened by soot. Inside, on the top floor, a single incendiary bomb was found lying on the wooden boards among centuries of dry timber. It had failed to go off. Fifty years later, the 1995 Kobe earthquake flattened buildings a few dozen kilometres away and left the castle essentially unharmed; the story told in Himeji is that a sake bottle standing on the top floor of the keep did not even tip over.

The Voice In The Well

In one of the inner courtyards there is a well known as Okiku's Well. The legend tells of a servant girl, Okiku, who uncovered a plot against her lord and was framed in return: one of the family's ten precious plates went missing and she was blamed. She was thrown into the well. Since then, the story goes, a voice rises from the well at night, counting plates. One, two, three, and so on to nine, and then a scream where the tenth should be. The tale exists in many versions across Japan, from kabuki to modern horror films, and Himeji's well is the most famous of the places that claim it. Nobody ever laid siege to this castle. It has always had a ghost anyway.

Today

Himeji was declared a national treasure in 1931 and in 1993 became one of Japan's first UNESCO World Heritage sites. Between 2009 and 2015 the keep was wrapped in scaffolding for a major restoration: every roof tile was checked or replaced and the plaster was redone from scratch. When the covers came off, the tower was so bright that locals complained it looked too white. A few seasons of weather have since taken care of that.

The castle is now in the care of the city of Himeji. The threats are no longer bombs or earthquakes. They are millions of visitors a year on narrow wooden stairs, the cost of keeping four-hundred-year-old timber sound, and, as always for a building like this, fire. The defensive system still works perfectly. It just funnels tourists now.