Himeji Castle

Himeji Castle crowns Himeyama, a low hill in the middle of the city of Himeji in Hyōgo Prefecture, western Japan. Its origins go back to a fort of 1333, but the complex that stands today was largely built between 1601 and 1609 by the warlord Ikeda Terumasa. With 83 surviving buildings and a dazzling white plastered keep, it is the largest castle in Japan and is widely regarded as the best-preserved example of the country's early modern castle architecture. Its colour and outline have earned it the nicknames White Egret Castle and White Heron Castle.

The hill was first fortified in 1333, during the Genkō War, by Akamatsu Norimura, the military governor of Harima Province. In 1346 his son Sadanori pulled the fort down and put up a castle called Himeyama in its place. Two centuries later, in 1545, the Kuroda clan was placed here on the orders of the Kodera clan, and over the next sixteen years the site was remodelled into Himeji Castle, the work being finished in 1561.

During the wars of the Sengoku period, Kuroda Yoshitaka handed the castle in 1580 to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, then campaigning in western Japan. Hideyoshi enlarged it considerably the following year and gave it a three-storey keep. A local story holds that he ran short of stone, and that an old woman donated her hand millstone, shaming others into bringing stones of their own; a millstone said to be hers is still pointed out in one of the walls.

After the 1600 Battle of Sekigahara, Tokugawa Ieyasu rewarded his son-in-law Ikeda Terumasa with Himeji. Ikeda removed Hideyoshi's keep and from 1601 to 1609 rebuilt the whole site on a far grander scale, adding three moats and creating the complex visible today; the labour involved is thought to have amounted to some 2.5 million man-days. After Ikeda and then his son died, the castle passed in 1617 to Honda Tadamasa, whose family added further buildings, among them a tower for his daughter-in-law.

The main keep looks from outside as though it has five storeys but actually holds six floors above a basement. Its defences were elaborate: roughly 1,000 loopholes for guns and bows survive, along with angled chutes for dropping stones or boiling liquid, and a maze of gates, baileys and walls designed to force attackers into a long spiral approach under fire from the towers. Storehouses kept rice and salt against a siege. Because the castle was never assaulted in this way, its defensive design was never actually tested in war. Under the Tokugawa shogunate, Himeji served instead as the seat of the lords who governed the surrounding domain through two and a half centuries of peace.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 made Japan's castles obsolete, and many were demolished. Himeji was abandoned in 1871, when the feudal domains were abolished, and the next year it was assigned to the army; some corridors and gates were cleared to make room for barracks. Government policy at one point marked the whole complex for demolition, and it was saved through the efforts of an army colonel, Nakamura Shigeto, who is commemorated by a stone monument inside the first gate. Preservation work started in 1877, though comprehensive state funding for restoration arrived only in 1910.

In 1945, near the end of World War II, bombing burned most of Himeji, but the castle survived; one firebomb that landed on the keep's top floor did not go off. A major repair campaign followed from 1956 to 1964, costing 550 million yen. The castle came through the Great Hanshin earthquake of January 1995 almost without damage, even though the city around it was badly hit.

Himeji Castle was inscribed on 11 December 1993, among the earliest UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Japan. Five of its structures are National Treasures, 74 other buildings are Important Cultural Assets, and the area inside the middle moat is a Special Historic Site. It is counted with Matsumoto and Kumamoto among the country's three premier castles and is the most visited castle in Japan, with over 2.86 million visitors in 2015. A conservation project begun in April 2010 cleaned and repaired the buildings, restoring the roofs from grey to their original white, before the castle fully reopened on 27 March 2015.