Otemae Street — Ribbon of Winter Light

The Story

After gazing down at the path of light from the station's observation deck (View No. 21), you can walk that very illuminated path toward the castle. As you draw closer, the sheer scale of the fortress towering ahead is a breathtaking winter spectacle.

Just a short distance from the castle, at the intersection in front of Egret Himeji, you look up to find the illuminated Main Keep standing divinely at the end of the sparkling tree-lined street. The beauty of this moment is truly awe-inspiring.

With a camera in hand, the immediate instinct is to set up a tripod and take a careful, long-exposure shot of this perfect composition. However, because this is a busy intersection on the city's main street, doing so is both impossible and dangerous. Instead, in that brief moment when the pedestrian signal turns green, the shot was taken handheld at a fast shutter speed. It is precisely because of the constraint of not being able to use a tripod that this photograph captures a miraculous, fleeting 'view' — one infused with the vibrant energy of the street and my own tension behind the camera.