With its gleaming white walls and elegantly terraced roofs, it is easy to forget that Himeji Castle was built as a fortress . Standing on two hilltops in the city of Himeji, the old fortress, also known as Himeji-jo, is the greatest surviving example of Japanese castle architecture from the early years of the Shogunate, which governed the island nation from the late 1500s to the 19th Century. Although never tested in battle, the castle’s elaborate defensive measures represent the best strategic design the period produced. While these measures have since been rendered obsolete, the same cannot be said for the castle’s soaring, pristine aesthetic, which earned it the nickname Shirasagi-jo – “Castle of the White Heron.”

Much of Japanese history vacillated between periods of factional and unified Imperial rule. During the 16th Century, the daimyo Oda Nobunaga began to conquer and consolidate the disparate shogunates of the archipelago into a single state, a process continued by his successor, Toyotomo Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi was as shrewd as Nobunaga was tactical, and by 1590, all of Japan was united under his nominal authority; however, without a sufficient political structure to truly hold sway over the islands, many regions were entrusted to the direct control of the local daimyo.[1]

Under Nobunaga and Hideyoshi’s reigns, Japan entered its Azuchi-Momoyama period, named for two castles built respectively by the two leaders. It was a time of sumptuously gilded wall paintings, elaborate folding screens, and the rise of the Japanese tea ceremony. The spread of castles across the Japanese archipelago between 1580 and 1630 remains one of the most prominent remnants of this cultural epoch, with many of the cities that formed around evolving into provincial capitals. When Hideyoshi died in 1598, rule over Japan passed not to his son, but to rival daimyo Tokugawa Ieyasu, who subsequently appointed his brother-in-law Ikeda Terumasa as governor of the western provinces. It was in 1609, at the height of the Azuchi-Momoyama period, that Terumasa chose Himeji as his seat of power – and set about creating a castle worthy of the city’s newfound status.[2,3]

The first iteration of Himeji Castle was built in 1346 by Akamatsu Sadanori, who sought a bastion against other daimyo during a previous period of political instability. Oda Nobunaga later gave the fortress to Hideyoshi in the 1570s, upon which it was expanded and formed into a proper castle. This was not enough for Terumasa, however, who patterned his renovations after Nobunaga’s castle at Azuchi. The grandiosity of his vision was matched by the sheer effort necessary to bring it into being: over 2,500,000 man days of labor went into the construction of Terumasa’s new Himeji Castle.[4]