Himeji, the Castle That Never Fell

Step out of Himeji station and the castle is already there, framed at the end of a straight boulevard a kilometre long, floating above the rooftops. Japan has around a dozen castles with original wooden keeps rather than concrete reconstructions, and Himeji-jo is by common agreement the finest of them: completed in 1609, plastered brilliant white against fire and damp, its gables stacked like folded wings. The nickname is Shirasagi-jo, the White Heron. It survived the sieges of the seventeenth century, the demolition of castles in the Meiji era, the firebombing that flattened the surrounding city in 1945 and the Kobe earthquake of 1995 without losing a beam, and a six-year restoration finished in 2015 returned the roof tiles and lime plaster to their original brightness.

What makes it extraordinary is that it was never a decoration. The approach spirals through baffled gates and dead ends designed to strand attackers under the loopholes; the walls are pierced with triangles and circles for muskets; stone chutes overhang the passages. Climb the six floors of the keep on ladder-steep stairs, in socks, past the pillars of fir and cypress that carry the whole structure, to a small shrine at the top and a view over the plain. In the Nishi-no-maru corridor you can walk the rooms where Princess Sen lived in the 1610s, and outside stands Okiku's Well, tied to one of Japan's most famous ghost stories.

Allow time for two more things. Koko-en, next door, is nine walled gardens laid out on the site of former samurai residences, each in a different classical style, with carp, a tea house and a waterfall. And take the ropeway up Mount Shosha to Engyo-ji, a thousand-year-old temple complex of vast wooden halls among cedars, still gloriously quiet. Himeji is an hour from Kyoto by shinkansen and worth far more than the hour most itineraries give it.