Black Swan

Having already got Himeji and Osaka on our first trip to Japan, I wanted Matsumoto on the second. It had been on the list a long time.

Because Matsumoto sits well off the usual Tokyo circuit, going there meant giving up a whole day to it — train out, train back, one castle. Worth it.

Before any of the castle, though, there was the town, which turned out to be the kind of place that rewards wandering. We ate well. We walked into a festival, entirely by accident, that was a festival about cats.

Once I got onto the castle grounds I could see what the photograph needed to be. The keep is dark — nearly black timber, which is where the Crow Castle nickname comes from — and the light kept moving across it as the cloud shifted. Birds were frequenting the moat the whole time, coming and going.

For about an hour and a half I stood there and waited for those three things to happen at once. Mostly they didn’t. The light would be right and the moat would be empty; something would swim through and the light would have gone.

When it finally came together, a swan was moving through the part of the moat holding the castle’s reflection — gliding across the black of it, giving the whole frame a sense of how big the building actually is. The red of the tsukimi-yagura, the moon-viewing turret, was the only real colour in an otherwise black-and-white scene.

The exposure is thirty seconds, which flattens the moat completely and is the reason the reflection reads as solid as the castle.

Afterwards we went inside and climbed all the way up. The stairs in there are closer to ladders, brutally steep, and the top tier looks out over the whole of Matsumoto with the mountains behind it.