After leaving Osaka, our next target was Himeji, to see Himeji castle. It was much better than Osaka castle, in my not-so-humble opinion. 
… and when you get to a new castle, what’s the first thing that you do? Play with the fish in the moat, of course!
Seriously. Just start tossing breadcrumbs or something else edible into the water and watch them all appear! Eventually we got enough clustered around that when you tossed a new crumb in, the water would all roil around and fish would actually be forced up out of the water by the crowd as they all fought over it. When we stopped to look around we actually had a number of Japanese people watching as well; so we gave some crumbs to a small child standing nearby and laughed about the fish with the older man to our left.
Of course, this always give birth to the best plan ever, wherein Andrew wanted to get a whole bunch of crackers and slowly make our way around the moat, gathering up all the fish with the promise of food; until we would meet on the opposite side of the castle and have all the fish in the moat there. That would have been crazy, roiling, fish-angry water. 
Someday maybe we’ll do it. 
The castle itself was quite imposing, viewed from the outside.
… and for a measure of scale, check out this picture of us with the castle.
When we got inside the castle, we were pleasantly surprised. It has not yet been re-built into a modern, office-building-like interior, and remains somewhat antique-looking…
… complete with old-style muskets on weapon racks.
The castle was very interesting, particularly in view of the secret rooms that were all over the place that served the purpose of allowing warriors to spring forth from the walls at strange places and attack invaders. Hidden warrior-cubby-hole sort of things… I want to add some to my house; you never know when they might come in handy.
After the castle itself, we toured the gardens (which are quite nearby, just a few minutes’ walk).
… and then we ran off to catch our train to Hiroshima.
