Japan for Castle Lovers & Castle-Town Travelers

About this book

Japan keeps its castles the way it keeps its hot springs: in specific places, by specific customs — and mostly for the traveller who stays. This guide gives the castle lover 200 complete journeys — not castles as objects, not towns as objects, but the castle journeys themselves: the white heron at Himeji in blossom and again in winter silence, the black keep of Matsumoto in the snow, mountain ruins standing above seas of cloud at dawn, sea fortresses whose moats are the tide, the castle you can sleep in at Ozu, the great walls of Kumamoto in their rebuilding, the red palace of Shuri rising from its ashes, a whole calendar of plum, petal-raft, maple and moon journeys, and a full final handbook of the twelve original keeps, stone-wall reading, the morning method and the second visit. Every entry is built as a working method: the castle and its town as they are actually met, exactly how the trip is constructed around staying in the town, its season and its appointed phenomenon with its bad-weather fallback, and the manners owed to a town that is a home before it is a sight. Opening hours and fees change, so none are asserted as fixed facts; every entry names the official source for its own ground — while the durable part, where the castle stands and how to travel for it, is guaranteed in full.