Tsutenkaku Hondori Shopping Street
Retro arcade of shops leading to a landmark tower, lit with vintage neon and street food.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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