Osaka Castle Park

This guide to Osaka Castle Park traces the fortress Toyotomi Hideyoshi built to announce his rise from peasant to ruler of nearly all of Japan, and the son, Hideyori, who inherited it along with a rival, Tokugawa Ieyasu. It follows the flimsy pretext Ieyasu's advisors found in an inscription on a temple bell, and the general Sanada Yukimura, who came close to cutting Ieyasu down on the battlefield before he was hunted down near a shrine. It ends at the storehouse beneath these lawns, where Hideyori and his mother Yodo-dono waited out the final siege of May 1615. Walk the stone ramparts that still trace Hideyoshi's original design.