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The builder
Hideyoshi planned a castle that would surpass Nobunaga's
In 1583 Toyotomi Hideyoshi began construction on the site of the Ishiyama Hongan-ji temple. The plan was modeled after Azuchi Castle, the headquarters of Oda Nobunaga, with gold leaf on the sides to impress visitors.
The walls
Walls from the 1620s still stand, laid without mortar
In 1620 the old structures were dismantled, and the shogunate assigned the new walls to individual samurai clans. The walls built in the 1620s still stand, made of interlocked granite boulders without mortar and marked with the crests of the families who gave them.
Lightning
Lightning set the castle on fire in 1660 and burned the keep in 1665
In 1660 lightning ignited the gunpowder warehouse, and the resulting explosion set the castle on fire. In 1665 lightning struck and burnt down the tenshu, the main keep.
The keep
The present keep is a concrete reproduction of the original
A ferroconcrete tenshu was built in 1931. American bombing raids damaged the reconstructed main keep during World War II. A restoration approved in 1995 was completed in 1997, with elevators and a modern museum inside.
The siege
Tokugawa Ieyasu took the first castle in 1615
In 1614 Tokugawa Ieyasu besieged the Toyotomi forces. Outnumbered about two to one, they fought off his 200,000-man army. Ieyasu had the outer moat filled, and in the summer of 1615 the castle fell and its buildings burned to the ground.
200,000men in the Tokugawa army of 1614
Day 2, morning
Next is Nishinomaru Garden.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Osaka Castle, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.