Himeji Castle

Himeji Castle, Sachi told me (she was pretty sure), is the second largest castle in Japan. The next one is the Emporer`s. This is the main gate.


My luck had already started, because today the castle was open for free. It was huge. Sachi told me it would take something like 5 hours to walk around the entire castle. All I could think as I saw these massive structures so cleverly designed to keep out and destroy enemies was that humans are incredible and humans are scary. I also thought about how hard it must have been to live in the 1800`s.

It was very dark, and every room on the inside looked the same, so I did not take many pictures inside. We had to take our shoes off before going inside. A plastic bag was provided to carry your shoes through the tour, I needed one bag for each of my shoes. The slippers I was provided were to small. A nice, but very curt old lady, slapped my arm, said something I couldn`t understand, and dropped the biggest pair of slippers they had in front of me. Then she ran off into a room.

We saw these two bad-ass mothers with equally bad beards--some traditional samurai gear.


The one on the left was a natural. He gave me a little sass with his shoulder for the camera. B-Boy stance!


Yoshiki at the gift shop. If I can be honest, the 18th century feudal warrior look is so last year.


And this kind of foul behavior from a proper young lady would`ve definitely landed her dead in a well in the old days. Actually, there is a real life horror story related to a well in Himeji Castle. It may have influenced The Ring a little bit. An upper rank aristocrat in the castle had some plans to overthrow the lord, but a woman who was loyal to the lord heard about this and tattled. The bad guys found out who did it and had her pushed into the very deep well. At night, they said that she could be heard counting the broken pieces of the really expensive plate set she was carrying at the time of her death, "1...2...3..."

I bought a bookmark and we said goodbye to beautiful Himeji Castle.


My fingers were red and I could barely feel them anymore. On our way out, we saw this.


Oh my god.