Japanese Man Spends 19 years Making Miniature Garden Castle

Hiroyasu Imura, a 69-year-old retired Japanese insurance examiner created this miniature replica of Himeji Castle in his garden. The castle is one of the 3 most famous castles in Japan.

More below:

Technorati Tags: crafts, Himeji Castle miniature, Hiroyasu Imura, ideas, Japan

He used reinforced plastic material for the structure and carved patterns on wooden molds to show the unevenness of roof tiles.

Imura also studied reference materials to reproduce structures that no longer exist. He made repeated trips to Himeji Castle to confirm details in drawings and to count the number of stones in stairways. He once dropped a rope surreptitiously to measure the height of a stone wall while trying to avoid being noticed by a security guard.

His most difficult challenge was reproducing the stone walls. He bought stone plates, broke them into pieces several centimeters in size and then assembled the pieces in molds to reproduce the slanting walls of the castle.

Concrete was poured into the molds to solidify them — a process that took 12 years to complete.

Imura spent 19 years pursuing his boyhood dream of faithfully producing a replica of Himeji Castle and completed his model at a scale of 1:23 in the garden of his home in Ise, Mie Prefecture, in April.

His wife gave him a book containing photographs of the castle on his 47th birthday, he saw a drawing of the castle in the book and then made up his mind to build a replica. He began building the model in 1989, using experience he gained as a joiner during his youth.

Now that’s the power of dreams.

From JapanProbe