Mido-Suji

This guide to Mido-suji in Osaka starts with a six-meter lane so narrow two ox carts could barely pass, and the 1920s mayor, Hajime Seki, who wanted to widen it sevenfold as a Depression-era jobs scheme. It follows the ridicule he faced for a road critics joked was wide enough to land an airplane on, and the crews who dug Japan's first subway beneath the street by hand, fighting floods and cave-ins the whole way. Stand here now and you're walking over that same tunnel, dug with picks and oxen.