castles and tigers!

It’s May 16th and our trip is more than halfway over; we’ve done so much it feels like we’ve been here a month already and we still have more to do! Today we got up early to travel to Himeji to visit the Himeji castle and then we ended our day with a Japanese baseball game.

Himeji castle is a great example of Japanese castles and traditional Japanese wooden architecture. It was started in 1333 and it was completed in its current form in 1609 by the son in law of the Shogun, Terumasa Ikeda. In order to preserve the integrity of the building and keep it intact, construction was being done on it so unfortunatley we were not able to see the whole thing. We were able to see a lot of the significant sights of the castle though: the Oil Wall made of sand and boiled rice water instead of the usual plaster, the fan curved stone walls which are harder to scale than normal walls, and the store house where rice and salt was kept.

We also spent a good deal of our time searching for “Okiku’s Well” on the castle grounds. Legend has it that a servant named Okiku serving the lord of the castle at the time overheard an assasination plot engineered by the chief retainer so she alerted the lord and foiled the plot. The chief retainer found out that it was Okiku who ruined his plans so he framed her for stealing on the the ten treasure dishes housed in the castle. The innocent Okiku was tortured to death and her body was thrown into the well. It is said that her ghost still haunts the castle grounds.

After that we got on a train to go to a baseball game between the Hanshin Tigers and the Rakuten Eagles. The rules of Japanese baseball are very similar to American baseball, but it is still a very different game. Teams are owned by companies, for instance the Hanshin Tigers are owned by the Hanshin railway company. The most noticable difference is in the fans. Fans at Japanese baseball games remind me of fans at college football games. There is a lot of chanting going on, each player has their own chant which the fans say when they get up to bat. The most memorable part of the game was at the end of the 7th ining; everyone in the stadium blew up a balloon and let them go at the same time.

All it all it has been a good day; the Tigers won, we got to see Himeji castle, and we became very familiar with the railway system. I hope you have been enjoying these blogs posts so far, there are only a few more left before we come back to Iowa!
Charlie Nichols