Tsutenkaku Tower and Shin-Sekai

So these entries are a little out of order, but I don't think that is really important. By the way, feel free to comment on any of these posts, and please fill out the survey to the right! I want to provide you with the most fulfilling blog experience possible, and I need your feedback!


Anyway, last Saturday I met up with Ken, one of my ex-students, and his girlfriend, and we went to Tsutenkaku, which is a tower in south-central Osaka. For years I had known of its existence - it's a well-known symbol of Osaka - and back when my friend Caroline used to live near Namba station I would catch glimpses of it on the way to her apartment, but I had never actually gone there.

Standing 103 meters tall (about one-third of the height of Tokyo Tower), Tsutenkaku was originally built in 1912, but it was destroyed in WWII, and the current incarnation was rebuilt in 1956. It's located in an area they call Shin-Sekai, the "new world" - a 1950's vision of a hopeful future. However, the glitz and shine have faded on this now somewhat grubby neighborhood, and the surrounding area is quite sketchy by Japanese standards. It kind of reminded me of the creepy broken-down amusement park where they had the showdown with Nicholas at the end of the Care Bears Movie.

We went up inside, and it afforded a wonderful night view of Osaka, to the backdrop of of a marvelous orange moon (which I spectacularly failed to take a decent photo of). We could see Ikoma mountain to the east, the Ferris wheel near the aquarium to the west, the faint glow of Umeda hidden behind some tall buildings to the north, another Ferris wheel which we suspect is the one at Banpaku-koen to the northeast, and ... whoa! Tennoji was RIGHT THERE to the southeast. Tennoji?? I've lived near Osaka for over three years, and Tennoji was always far to the south of Namba in my mind. But there it was, right in front of us, and we had just walked from Namba minutes earlier. It was one of those moments that reconfigures the geometry of your internal representation of the world, synapses crackling as fast as they can to re-render this abruptly-reshaped map and send off alerts to memory centers holding data with dependencies on its basic spatial constraints. Heavy stuff. I needed a drink of water.



Of course, no reconstructed inner-city observatory tower would be complete without its own graven idol. Billiken, a wooden sculpture of a fat, smirking, pucker-faced dwarf, sits upon its wooden throne, standard Japanese shinto money-box at its feet for people to throw coins into and clap and pray. I think rubbing Billiken's foot was part of the ritual too, judging by the extraordinary concavity of its right sole. Carved by an American as a gift, Billiken's inscription (not visible in this picture) reads "The god of things as they ought to be". Or rather, the left side reads "The god of", the center panel reads "things as they", and the right side reads "ought to be". The reason I point this out is that apparently, whoever made the souvenirs for Tsutenkaku neglected to realize there was writing on the two sides. Everything from the omamori (good luck charms), to the 3D cast iron models of Billiken, sport only the words "things as they", a statement more mysterious, certainly, than the sound of one hand clapping.



On the way out, Ken and I discovered, nearly forgotten in the back of the visitors' center, cracked blue paint from a past age peeling off in splinters, two actual fun-house mirrors! What they were doing there I don't know, but it fit right into the Care Bears image that had already fixed itself in my mind.

By the way, much like the old Hancock building in Boston, the lights atop Tsutenkaku signal a forecast of the coming weather. Unlike the old Hancock building in Boston, there is no catchy rhyme to help you remember what the different colors mean. The diagram here shows the nine possible combinations. By the way, I'm getting some of these graphics from this Tsutenkaku website. There are some great "Engrish" explanations of things in here, so check it out if you have the time and inclination.


Anyway, after a dinner of greasy Chinese food bathed in tobacco smoke in a little restaurant at the base of the tower, we skirted around the city zoo to get to Tennoji station to catch the train home. On the way we passed several open spaces full of sleeping homeless people. This is a very uncommon sight in Japan, and it was a little scary - as we were walking through one pretty dark alley, we passed this naked guy just sitting there, staring at us and talking to himself. As we walked on around the zoo, captive animals called out to us in hopeless anguish from inside their concrete prison walls. "This is Shin-Sekai," they were saying. "This is the new world."