Mount Tenpō

This guide to Mount Tenpo in Osaka opens with an odd fact: in 1993 cartographers quietly dropped a mountain from the national map because it had shrunk too small to count, and you're standing on it now. It traces the mound's rise in 1831, when dredging crews piled river mud here to guide ships and it grew tall enough for cherry trees, souvenir stalls and a sketch by the artist Hiroshige. From there it follows decades of soldiers, factories and groundwater working the mountain down toward its vanishing point, and the locals who wouldn't let it disappear.