White flowers in front of a white castle. Himeji city gives about a thousand cherry trees in the grounds, Somei-yoshino and weeping varieties among them, and describes them as set off against the great keep and its white walls. Himeji is plastered in white lime, and the building reads as white from a considerable distance, which is why it is called the white heron castle.

Castle blossom usually works by contrast, and the contrast is normally the point.

A black keep makes the flowers stand out. Grey stonework does the same thing more quietly, and a ruined site lets the sky do it. Here neither applies, because the background and the subject are, broadly speaking, the same colour.

What separates them instead is texture. The plaster is flat and hard and holds an edge; the blossom has no edge at all, and at any distance it dissolves rather than ends. Put the two whites next to one another and the difference between them is not one of shade at all but of substance, which is a harder thing to photograph than a contrast and a more interesting thing to stand in front of. The timing given on this page is not the city's; it comes from the weather record for Kobe.