Today we head for Hiroshima but on the way we are stopping at Himeji Castle which is another world heritage site. We set the alarm for a little earlier as we expected checkout to be busy but as it turned out it wasn’t, there was a big group in reception but no problem at checkout however this is the hotel with the worlds slowest lifts. We took the underground to Kyoto then jumped onto the bullet train for the 50 minute journey to Himeji. It felt like we were the only people getting off here but once we were on the platform it was obvious that a number of tourists were doing the same as us, breaking a journey here to see the castle. We had been told that there would be lockers at the station where we could store our luggage while we visited the castle, this was true but although they had a number of lockers they didn’t seem to have any that were the right size for our cases. We went to two different banks of lockers and just as we were about to give up and walk to the castle with the cases we saw another set by tourist information, here there were actually quite a few free so we dropped the cases and set off in search of the castle. Luckily it wasn’t difficult to find as we had been able to see it from the train and it is literally straight up the road from the station. The castle was originally constructed as a fort in 1333, then in 1581 they turned it into a three story castle. It was built by Hideyoshi Tototomi as he needed a strong fort because of the almost continual conflict in Japan. The castle was enlarged and remodelled until it reached its current state in 1601. The castle was built mostly of wood and it is said that 360 tons of wood and 75,000 tiles weighing 3,000 tons were used in the construction making it the largest in Japan, it is believed that the whole structure weighs about 5,700 tones. It looks like a five story tower (keep) it is actually seven, it was never really explained why they did it like this but it is impressive all the same. The main keep has two supporting pillars the West and East large pillar these were replaced during the restoration that was carried out in the Showa Era (1950’s) the upper part of the West pillar was replaced with a 650 year old cypress and the lower part with a 750 year old cypress. The East pillar, originally a fir, only needed to have a small portion of the base replaced with cypress, impressive when you think that the pillars are 24.6 metres. The castle has 27 towers and 21 gates, most impressively it has 997 shooting holes, 844 for guns and 153 for bows, they are different shapes; oblong for bows and round, triangular or square for guns, depending on the position of the opening they are called tachi-zama for standing, i-sama for kneeling and ne-sama for the prone position. We walked all round the main keep each floor is slightly different and has something of note. The basement has a sink – although they don’t know why and two lavatories which they assume were included in case of siege but as it was never attacked they were never used. This floor also has four entry’s each has a double door to make it easy to defend. While climbing up the building it isn’t clear which two floors don’t correspond to the outside tiers as all have windows and stone drops to defend the castle. The third floor is where the weapons were housed and there are racks on the walls where they were hung, the fourth has ‘warriors hiding places’ each of the corners of the building has a secret compartment where soldiers would wait to ambush any attackers. The fourth floor also has high windows and a platform to allow soldiers to fire guns out of these windows, there are smaller even higher windows which were put in to allow the gun smoke to escape. The castle has been used in a number of films including the James Bond film you only live twice where it was the Ninja training centre, it is called the castle of miracles as during the Second World War the city was bombed twice and although one bomb hit the castle it didn’t explode so although most of the city was destroyed the castle wasn’t. It also, more impressively avoided being pulled down about 150 years ago when the samurai era ended it was classified under the ‘abandoned castle order’ and should have been demolished but it was put up for auction and brought for 23.5 yen (about 100,000 today). After we finished looking round the Keep we went to the West Bailey which was the residence built for Princess Sen. There are about 20 rooms along a corridor which is where the ladies in waiting lived along with the rooms she lived in. She seems to have been pretty unlucky as she was married off by her father at the age of seven (her husband was 11), but unfortunately he committed suicide in Osaka when he was only just 20, she had begged her grandfather to show mercy but he wouldn’t and she only just escaped from the castle as it was burning down. She married again – this time for love and ended up living in the castle with her second husband, unfortunately her sone died from a fever at the age of 3 and she wasn’t able to have any more children, her husband died a few years later at the age of 31 so after this she became a nun and lived in the Bailey! By the time we had finished walking around we had taken almost three hours so we walked back into town and found somewhere to have lunch, we ended up with chicken and rice but it was really nice as the chicken had some kind of coating on it. From there we headed back to the station and after having an ice cream on route we picked up the cases from the locker then went through to the platform to wait for the train. We only have an hour on the train then we will be in Hiroshima. We decided to take a taxi round to the hotel and have a fantastic room on the 24th floor looking over Hiroshima, we decided to head down to the bar to do the website only to find that the hotel doesn’t have a bar so we went to a local place and had a couple of drinks while planning tomorrow’s itinerary.
