A fort first stood on Himeyama hill in the 14th century. In the 1580s the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi rebuilt it, and between 1601 and 1609 the lord Ikeda Terumasa turned it into the great castle complex we see today, with a six-storey main keep linked to three smaller ones.
Its brilliant white plaster walls and graceful roofs earned it the name Shirasagi-jo, the White Heron Castle. Behind the beauty is a clever defensive maze: winding paths, dead ends and gates designed to confuse attackers on their way to the keep.
Himeji survived the bombing of the city in 1945 and the great Kobe earthquake of 1995. In 1993 it became one of Japan's first UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and a major restoration was completed in 2015.
