Tsutenkaku Hondori Shopping Street

This guide to Tsutenkaku Hondori Shopping Street in Osaka opens with a small mystery: a grinning idol called Billiken, worshipped for good luck since the street's 1912 heyday of a tower modeled on the Eiffel Tower and an amusement ground styled on Coney Island, vanished sometime around 1925 without a trace. It traces the street's rise around that tower and funfair, and the crowds who once rode a cable car swinging them straight into the fairground. For over fifty years afterward, this street sold kushikatsu and cheap thrills to an empty pedestal where Billiken used to sit.