Day 09: First day in Osaka, Himeji Castle

Like other days in Japan, we were rushing to move luggage in the trains and subway. Also, we woke up so early, packed up our stuff and moved from one city to another city. On the way to Osaka, I realized that our trip was close to epilogue, which made me felt upset. I hope that we could be together forever because we build a deep friendship in short time, only two weeks! This made me to treasured every minute with other participant in the rest of trip. Although our schedule was so tight, we were clear on our goals which were culture adventure and business tour. Today absolutely was significantly culture portion of our trip due to our tour in Himeji castle. For every culture trip in Japan, it is avoidable for me to compare culture between China and Japan. This is because I was familiar with Chinese culture and there also were influence between China and Japan. Undoubtedly, Himeji castle is a good example for comparisons.

Today was raining, but it is so cool for us to witness Himeji castle under the rain. This was the greatest architecture I have seen in Japan. It was amazing for me that this project was designed and built in 15th century of Japan when there were no advanced machines like our current period. Himeji castle served as prototypical castle of Japan, which contain rigid structure, defensive feature, and gardening design. The exterior design of castle is grand with stone foundation, whitewashed wall and delicate garden. In the interior design of castle, most of things were made of woods, which were elegant. There a was confused maze to access the main building of the castle. We had to walk along with spiral pattern around castle and climbed up narrow stairs to the top. This was a complex defensive system and the gates, baileys, outer walls and moat were organized. It is difficult to find out path and gate to access the top of building. According to Dr.Londo’s explanation, this approach allowed the instructors to be watched and made them hard to enter the core of complex. It was an epitome of architecture feat in ancient Japan. After viewing Himeji castle, I was remind that there were similar lay out to Forbidden City in Beijing, my hometown. There also were confused path inside Forbidden City and several walls were around the main building. A moat was in the outermost of Forbidden City as defensive function. Similarly, both Himeji castle and Forbidden City were located in the center of city and the other buildings were constructed around them. We could clearly view both layout of Himeji and Beijing being extended from their controller’s building from level to level. The hierarchy of society was reflected by layout of city. Emperor always lived in the center of city, which indicated authority and social position.

Japan was similar to China in its ancient culture and tradition. However, Japan has fairly fast development after Second World War. In this trip, I realize Japan had already been much more advanced than China in culture protection, education and technology. They had similar construction performance before, however, I had to accept that Japanese are more concern for their culture promotion, environmental protection and sustainable development than China. There are long distance for China to catch up to the pace of Japan. This is why I came to Japan to learn about their advanced management and culture.