Tsūtenkaku
— — a neon tower for the working part of the city.
Not only on a wall.
“The tower that watches Shinsekai. A hundred and three metres of steel above a grid of kushikatsu shops and standing bars in the old south side of Osaka, where the streets were laid out around the tower in 1912 in deliberate imitation of Paris. The current Tsūtenkaku went up in 1956. The Hitachi neon ring at the top changes colour every hour to forecast tomorrow's weather. Local people use it the way other cities use a clock. From the observation deck, the city pours out toward the Yodo River and the mountains hold the far edge of the view.
Tsūtenkaku, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Tsūtenkaku is a one hundred and three metre observation tower in the Shinsekai district of Naniwa Ward, southern Osaka. The first tower opened in 1912 as the centrepiece of a brand-new amusement district modelled on Paris and Coney Island, with streets laid in a deliberate radial pattern around its base. That tower was dismantled during the Second World War. The current structure was designed by Tachū Naitō, the engineer who would later design Tokyo Tower, and opened on 28 October 1956. The Hitachi neon at the crown has run almost continuously since, with the colour band changing each hour to indicate the forecast for the following day.
The colour scheme at the top is a public service. The Tsūtenkaku Kanko company programs the Hitachi ring so that the upper band shows tomorrow's daytime weather and the lower band shows tomorrow's night, in a colour code Osakans grow up reading: white for clear, orange for cloudy, blue for rain, pink for snow. The scheme has been in place in some form since the Showa era. At ground level, the streets of Shinsekai keep the older kind of Osaka light — paper lanterns, hand-painted shop signs, the buzz of small fluorescent tubes over the kushikatsu counters along Janjan Yokocho.
The main observation deck sits at roughly ninety-one metres. The tower is open daily from ten in the morning to eight in the evening, with last entry forty minutes before closing. An adult ticket for the main deck runs about nine hundred yen and the open-air Tenbo Paradise deck above it adds a small surcharge. The nearest station is Ebisuchō on the Sakaisuji Line, two minutes on foot; Dōbutsuen-mae on the Midōsuji Line is a five-minute walk. The Shinsekai grid around the tower is best in the late afternoon, when the kushikatsu places open and the lanterns come on.