Himeji

A fort stood on Himeyama hill from the 14th century, when the Akamatsu clan held the province of Harima, and the hill's position at a narrowing of the route between the capital region and western Honshu made it worth holding. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was given the site in 1580 and the following year raised a three-storey keep as a base for his campaigns to the west. After the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 Tokugawa Ieyasu granted Harima to his son-in-law Ikeda Terumasa, who between 1601 and 1609 rebuilt the castle on the scale seen today: a great white keep linked to three smaller ones, ringed by spiralling walls, gates and baileys designed to confuse an attacker. Honda Tadamasa added the western bailey in 1617–18 for the household of Senhime, Ieyasu's granddaughter.

The castle was never besieged. A castle town of samurai quarters, merchants and craftsmen grew below it, and the Himeji domain passed through a series of lordly families until the abolition of the domains in 1871. The army took over the grounds in the Meiji period, and the complex was slated for demolition before being saved by the efforts of an army colonel, Nakamura Shigeto.

American bombing in July 1945 burned out most of the city, but the keep survived. Himeji was rebuilt on a new plan whose centrepiece was the wide Otemae-dori boulevard driven from the station to the castle gate. A major structural restoration ran from 1956 to 1964, UNESCO listed the castle in 1993, and a five-year repair of the roofs and plaster finished in 2015, returning the keep to a startling white. Mergers in 2006 brought in surrounding towns and the offshore Ie Islands.

Himeji's identity begins and ends with the castle, called Shirasagi-jo, the White Heron, for its pale, wing-like gables. Its survival made it the stand-in castle of Japanese cinema and television, used by Akira Kurosawa and in foreign films, and the temple halls of Engyo-ji on Mount Shosha have served the same purpose. Locals measure directions by the keep, which appears in the city's crest, its manhole covers and the view down the main street.

The festival calendar is strong. The Nada fighting festival each October at Matsubara Hachiman Shrine in Shirahama is one of the roughest and most famous in western Japan, with teams in loincloths driving heavy portable shrines into each other and tall yatai floats hauled through the crowd. In June the yukata festival fills the streets around Osakabe Shrine with cotton summer robes, a custom traced to an 18th-century lord who let townspeople attend a shrine ceremony in informal dress.

The old crafts of the castle town survive in reduced form: white-tanned leather, Buddhist altars, hand-forged fire tongs, matches and wax candles, all listed among the prefecture's traditional crafts. The local speech, Banshu dialect, has a blunt, clipped reputation even by the standards of western Japan, and residents tend to treat that as a compliment. Baseball loyalty runs to the Hanshin Tigers, whose ground is an hour east.

About 530,000 people live in Himeji, one of Hyogo Prefecture's largest cities after Kobe and the centre of the Harima plain. The built-up area spreads from the hills in the north to reclaimed industrial land on the coast, and the 2006 mergers added farming villages, a mountain valley and a group of small islands to the municipality.

Heavy industry underpins the economy. A large steelworks and specialist steel plants stand on the coast at Hirohata, alongside chemical works, a port handling bulk cargo and engineering firms, though blast-furnace work has been cut back in recent years. A major maker of money-handling machines is headquartered in the city. Leather tanning, seed and food companies, and a broad base of small subcontracting workshops fill in around them. Tourism is significant but concentrated in a small area, and much of it lasts only a few hours between trains.

Daily life follows the rail line. Commuters ride the Shinkansen or rapid trains to Kobe and Osaka in under an hour, schoolchildren cycle in numbers along the riverside paths, and the covered arcades near the station carry most of the everyday shopping that has not moved to roadside malls. Like much of provincial Japan the city is ageing and slowly shrinking, and keeping the central shopping streets occupied, and persuading castle visitors to stay a night, are recurring concerns of the city government.

Himeji's best-known dish is its version of oden, the simmered winter pot of daikon, boiled eggs, tofu and fishcakes. Here each piece is lifted out and dipped in soy sauce mixed with grated ginger, a habit so fixed that the city markets it as shoga-joyu oden, ginger-soy oden, and it is eaten all year at counters around the station rather than only in the cold months.

The Harima Sea supplies the rest. Anago, saltwater conger eel, is grilled with a sweet glaze and laid over rice or pressed into sushi; octopus, sea bream and shrimp come from the same waters, and oysters are farmed along the coast towards Ako. Inland, the country towns west of the city produce Banshu somen, very fine wheat noodles dried in winter and eaten cold in summer, and Tatsuno's soy-sauce breweries season much of the local cooking. The Harima plain is also rice country, and Hyogo sake is poured widely in the city's izakaya.

Sweets and snacks are their own tradition. Confectioners near the castle sell bean-paste cakes and rice sweets tied to the White Heron, and the older coffee shops serve almond toast, thick-cut bread spread with sweetened almond paste and grilled, a breakfast that Himeji claims as its own.