Tsutenkaku

When Tsutenkaku Tower was dismantled in 1943 after fire damage, its steel was redirected to wartime manufacturing. The 64-meter structure, once Asia’s second tallest, was gone. But after the war, local volunteers campaigned to resurrect it, and in 1956 a new tower rose even taller. Inside sits Billiken, an American god of good luck created in 1908, whose arms are supposedly too short to scratch his own feet. Visitors rub his soles for fortune in return, a ritual so popular the feet have been replaced multiple times.

The rebuilt tower does more than house a foreign deity with a Missouri backstory. At night, a ring of lights near its peak functions as a public weather beacon, white for sun, orange for clouds, blue for rain, forecasting the next day for anyone in the neighborhood who bothers to look up. It is a strange thing for a monument to a wartime loss to become: not a memorial, but a working instrument, still telling Osaka what tomorrow holds.