Himeji Castle started out as a small fort on Himeyama Hill in 1333, this fort was dismantled and repurposed into Himeyama Castle in 1346. In 1561, the Himeyama Castle was rebuilt into Himeji Castle by the Kodera Clan. Then in 1580, the castle was presented to Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣 秀吉), one of Japan’s Three Great Unifiers (三英傑, San Eiketsu), who added a three-story tenshu (天守, Main Keep) to it in 1581. In 1600, the Tokugawa Shogunate (徳川幕府, Tokugawa Bakufu) was established, and the castle was gifted by Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川 家康), the shogun (将軍), to his son-in-law, Ikeda Terumasa. Ikeda then remodeled the entire castle, demolishing the old keep, building a new six-story keep, and created the castle complex in 1609 that we see today.
After the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration (明治維新, Meiji Ishin) in 1868, the modernization of Japan meant that castles had lost its defensive purpose. As with other castles in Japan, the cost of preserving and maintaining the structure was judged to be too expensive, and so Himeji Castle was slated for demolition. With its decaying state, weeds were growing on the roof tiles, and the roof and walls themselves were beginning to tilt. Among the Japanese populace, however, there was interest to see castles preserved after the Meiji Restoration. And so, Colonel Nakamura Shigeto, commander of the Ministry of War’s 4th Operation Division and also the head of construction and repair of the army, as well as Max von Brandt, the German diplomatic representative, filed a proposal to Aritomo Yamagata, the War Minister, to preserve the castle. The minister agreed to preserve both Himeji Castle and Nagoya Castle, the latter of which was destroyed by World War II Air Raids (日本本土空襲, Nihon Hondo Kūshū), under funding from the Ministry of War. A stone statue monument honoring Colonel Nakamura Shigeto is placed in the castle’s first gate, Hishi Gate (菱の門, Hishi-no-mon).
Despite the agreement though, the actual budget for the maintenance of the castle was only half of what was requested, allowing for emergency repairs, although the castle continued to decay over time. An organized citizen’s effort in 1910 successfully petitioned the Japanese government to repair the aging castle.
Interestingly, when the castle was first considered for demolition, it was actually put up for public auction in 1871, and Kobe Seiichiro actually bought Himeji Castle for ¥23.5 (worth around ¥200,000 today). While unclear, it was said that he had purchased the castle to demolish it, build houses on the land, and repurpose the tiles from the castle for those houses. The cost then proved too large and these plans were shelved. It is not entirely clear what happened to the rights ownership of the castle after that. In 1927, Kobe Seikichi, the son of Kobe Seiichiro, announced that he would sue the Ministry of Finance for ownership of Himeji Castle. The lawsuit was eventually dropped, and in a newspaper article interview, it was claimed that the Ministry of War had bought the castle back in 1874.
During the Second World War, Himeji city was a target of bombings by the US Air Force. In an effort to protect the castle, the entire castle keep was covered by a large black netting to keep it out of sight from air forces. The castle keep was actually hit by a bomb that penetrated the window boards on the top floor, but miraculously didn’t explode. The rest of the castle town was less lucky and burned down in the bombings. It is said that the townspeople cried the next morning when they realized the castle had survived the bombings. In the 1990s, an American B-29 bomber pilot was interviewed when he visited Himeji Castle, and he noted that he was unaware that there was even a castle in the city. The bombings were done at night, and the reflections from the moat, and the keep covered in the black netting had led him to think that the area was a swamp, and so he thought it would be meaningless to bomb a swamp.
The castle has also undergone two major repair and restoration works, the Great Showa Repair and the Heisei Repair, named after the Showa Era (1926-1989, 昭和, Shōwa) and Heisei Era (1989-2018, 平成時代, Heisei-jidai) in which they were done. The Great Showa Repair started in 1933, and was only completed in 1964, where the entire keep was fully dismantled, and the main pillars were replaced after it was discovered that the wood had began to rot. The Heisei Repair began in 2009 and completed in 2015, this time the keep was not dismantled, but work was done to repair the white plaster, replace roof tiles, and increase the structure’s resistance to earthquakes. This restoration also restored the castle’s white exterior, cleaning off the grime, and bringing the castle back to its original glory.
