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Himeji Castle




      I visited Himeji Castle during Golden week. The castle was built in 1346 by Akamatu Sadanori and is designed to have the appearance of a white heron in flight. The Castle is built primarily of wood and the exterior has been plastered using a mixture of slaked lime, shell ash, hemp fiber and seaweed leaving the entire structure white except for the roofs. The roofs themselves are made of black convex and concave tiles set in place using more white plaster resulting in a white and black latticed look across all the roofs of the castle.

      Himeji Castle has survived centuries of changes of occupants and wars. It miraculously survived the bombing of Himeji city twice and became something of a symbol of hope and strength. The west Baily that surrounds the perimeter of the castle famously housed Princess Sen who is known for having one of the few marriages at that time that is believed to have been for love. The castle is scheduled for thorough repairs and maintenance every fifty years and the Heisei era restoration was completed only 2015, 45 years after the Showa era restoration.

      The interior of the castle is currently left almost entirely empty with a few placards explaining the function of various structures within the castle and some detailing the life of Princess Sen in the West Bailey. However, I think just the structure of the castle alone can tell something of the lives of the people who lived there. In the castle itself there is very little that separates the floors into individual rooms. This is in keeping with the traditional sliding paper doors, but I think it also probably indicates that architects tried to make as much use of the natural light as possible. This also makes sense when taking into account the size of the floors, which decreases with each ascending level, but even the bottom most level is small enough that light from the window holes penetrates to the center. This also becomes somewhat of a necessity as all of the walls and flooring are a deep brown of natural wood which would be hard to brightly light even with electric bulbs. In the west baily as well, the structure is long and thin, and is divided into two sections lengthwise; a line of room and a hallway. Again, presumably to make best use of the light. However, a side effect of this is that, since none of the windows use glass, all rooms are somewhat susceptible to the elements. In the main keep large stoves are built into the walls of the castle, which would presumably provide some heat, but because the are is not divided into smaller rooms, any heat produced is likely to dissipate into the empty space. In the West Bailey I saw no sign of any heating system. It's unlikely that in a system like this the temperature of the castle could ever be changed significantly from the outside temperature. People would need to be able to dress for the weather instead of relying on any heating.

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