Toyotomi Hideyoshi Statue

This guide to the Toyotomi Hideyoshi Statue in Osaka opens in 1943, when soldiers came for the bronze figure standing here, not to admire it but to melt it down for wartime metal. It traces Hideyoshi's own rise from a peasant's son to one of the warlords who unified Japan, and the shrine Emperor Meiji ordered built here in 1879 to honor him after Hideyoshi raised Osaka Castle behind it. That first statue lasted only a few decades before the war swallowed it whole, leaving this spot with only an absence for over sixty years.