In 1945, as firebombing burned the city of Himeji, a bomb struck the top floor of the castle’s main keep and failed to explode. The site on Himeyama Hill was first fortified in 1333 by Akamatsu Norimura, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi added a three-story keep in 1581. After the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu gave it to his son-in-law Ikeda Terumasa, who tore down the old keep and rebuilt the complex from 1601 to 1609 with an estimated 2.5 million man-days of labor. The result, nicknamed the White Heron Castle, was a maze: originally 84 gates, a 130 meter straight line from the Hishi Gate stretched into a 325 meter winding path, and roughly a thousand loopholes covering every turn.

No army ever attacked it. Inside, the keep looks like five stories from outside but holds six plus a basement, anchored by two great pillars of fir and cypress, with a first floor that once stored over 280 matchlock guns and 90 spears. Hidden rooms let defenders ambush intruders, a salt turret held 3,000 bags, and 33 wells guaranteed water. In the Meiji era the government slated the castle for destruction until Colonel Nakamura Shigeto lobbied to save it. It then outlasted the 1945 bombing and the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, which left a sake bottle on the sixth floor altar standing upright, and it has since been restored from 1956 to 1964 and again from 2010 to 2015.

• Loopholes cut in circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles for archers and matchlock guns
• Why interlocking mortise and tenon joints let the wooden keep sway through a quake that toppled modern concrete
• Okiku’s well, where a murdered servant is said to count dishes at night, and the mind-reading yokai said to live at the top of the tower
• The Widow’s Stone, a hand millstone donated for Hideyoshi’s keep and still set in the wall under wire mesh
• The legend of master carpenter Sakurai Genbei, who became convinced his keep leaned to the southeast