Tsuruhashi Shopping Street

This guide to Tsuruhashi Shopping Street in Osaka opens with a birth in 1952, in one of these market lanes: a baby girl who would grow up to become the secret mother of a future North Korean leader. It rewinds to 1945, when American air raids leveled the neighborhood and Korean traders, many from Jeju Island, built a black market from the rubble, then lost their citizenship overnight in a 1947 law that cut them off from food rations. Three shopkeeper associations had formed to run the market by 1951. Listen for the grills as you walk among the roughly eight hundred stores.