Tenjinbashi-suji Shopping Street

This guide to Tenjinbashi-suji Shopping Street in Osaka opens in the year 901, when a court scholar named Sugawara no Michizane was exiled from Kyoto and died two years later, followed by a string of disasters back home that his frightened court blamed on his ghost. It traces how that fear turned into a shrine and a god of learning, and how the pilgrim-route market beside it grew into one of Japan's longest covered shopping streets, lined with shops that trace back centuries.