Sakura Majesty

To be at Himeji before the grounds opened, we took the first train out of Kyoto — properly the first, the one that leaves in the dark — and got off in a town that was still mostly asleep.

Walking in from the station, we had the road to ourselves. We went the long way around the outside of the compound, following the perimeter, not really looking for anything in particular.

When we came around the corner on the far side, the whole thing opened up at once. The castle stood off to the northwest with the dawn already on its walls, the broad moat in front of it, and a red bridge over the water that was the only strong colour in the frame besides the blossoms.

And the blossoms were at full bloom. Cherry branches came in from both sides and closed over the top of the view, reaching out toward the castle across the water.

Every so often a bit of breeze would move through and take petals off the branches, and they would come down around us and land on the moat and sit there.

At twenty-five seconds the moat goes to glass. That’s the reason for the exposure — long enough that every ripple averages out and the castle gets a second, upside-down copy of itself in the water.

They call it White Heron Castle, and in that light you can see where that came from: the walls hold onto the early sun and go faintly luminous, closer to feathers than to plaster.

Nobody else was there. The grounds hadn’t opened, the tour groups hadn’t started, and for that whole stretch of the morning it was two people, a castle and a moat full of petals.