You can normally stop and see the castle in a couple of hours, but we stayed most of the day, as Himeji appears to be ground zero for the cherry blossom festival. as you can see from our isolation in the middle of the field, all the best spots under the cherry blossom trees were taken by about 5 am, but the whole place filled up by the afternoon, and there's a little carnival at the entrance and lots of food and drink stalls. Somchai couldn't stop eating the giant squid on a stick, but I could. We hung out at the party for a few hours, then took the train to Kurashiki en route back to Kyoto.

25. Himeji

I just had a complaint about the formatting of the posts (which I agree with), which is that often the pictures mash the words into narrow gaps that make it hard to read. My only controls on the pictures are whether to align them left or right, and I usually choose one of each, which I think sometimes drives the words into a narrow column in the middle. I'm now going to try left aligning both pics to see if that helps, but I think I'm going to end up with big white spaces instead. It also looks totally different on different monitors depending on screen size, so there seems to be very little I can do to control the aesthetics here, but if anyone has any ideas please help! Back to the gripping narrative...

On our last day staying in Kyoto we took another short train ride to Himeji, which has probably the most impressive castle remaining in Japan. It was built by the shogun around 1600 to reinforce his control over rebellious nobles. This was the first castle (as opposed to palace or other residential buildings) I've seen outside the West, so I was quite surprised at the differences. When you see a Western castle, it's very easy to picture the fighting, with crenellated rooftops allowing soldiers to shoot down on attackers, and slits in the walls for archers to shoot their arrows etc. I really couldn't figure out how this castle worked. It was awe-inspiring, perched on a cliff with quite elaborate architecture, but there didn't seem to be any place for doing castle-y things like attacking and defending. There were gates you'd have to get through and narrow passages you'd have to navigate up to the castle, but once you're there, it seemed like you pretty much just open the door and come in, while the defenders could only look down at you through the windows. I'm sure it functioned better than that, but more importantly, it's quite a unique sight architecturally.