A photo from the top floor of the main tower of Himeji Castle. The ornaments at the end of the roof ridge shown here is the tail of a fish (dolphin, I was told). You can see the tails of fish on almost all of the temples, shrines and castles that we visited. Apparently, the image of a fish on the roof was supposed to protect against fires. I would say that all of the historical buildings that we visited had this type of roof and I would also say that all the buildings we visited had at least one major fire in its history. They could have used more fish, I guess. :-)
The present-day entrance to Himeji Castle. Originally, the series of three moats that were built in the early 1600's put the entrance to Himeji Castle just to the north of the present-day Himeji train station. As I stood there taking the photo, the Himeji station was about a mile behind me. Maybe it's because I don't read Japanese, but the NEC logo seems out of place.
After we visited Himeji Castle, we returned to the Himeji station and caught the Shinkansen back to Nagoya. As we were waiting to catch our train, I took several photos of these extremely fast trains. The one shown here is the latest model. It reportedly travels as fast as 300 km/h on standard rails. We never had the opportunity to travel on this style of train, but we made several trips on the older trains. They only travel at 200 km/h.
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