Hokoku Shrine

This guide to Hokoku Shrine in Osaka begins with a wartime melting-down: a bronze statue of Toyotomi Hideyoshi fed into a furnace for the war effort, leaving the pedestal behind Osaka Castle empty for decades. It traces Hideyoshi's own rise from a farmer's son and foot soldier to ruler of the whole country under the warlord Oda Nobunaga, and the humble gourd he carried as his battlefield marker to remember where he started. His heir Hideyori is honored here too, killed at only twenty one when the family's fortune finally ran out.