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Billiken: The God of Things as They Ought to Be
If you expect the impossible, here is your lucky charm.
By Daniel Gauss
As I emerged from the subway station at Shin-Imamiya, in Osaka, staring at my phone and Google maps app, trying to orient myself, a distinguished-looking elderly gentleman walked up to me and motioned for me to show him my phone. He took a look at my phone, handed it back to me, and then walked with me to my hotel. He could not speak English, and I could not speak Japanese — no matter. Smiling cheerfully, he walked with me in silence until we arrived at my hotel, bowed to me and then went walking in the opposite direction — so he had gone out of his way to help me.
A couple days later at an elevated metro station, a high school student walked up to me and said, in nearly perfect English, “Sir, you look lost. Can I help you?” After I told him the train line I needed, he walked with me to make sure that I got to the right platform. He, like the elderly gentleman, walked every step with me to make sure I got to the right place.
I found this type of kindness and friendliness throughout the city. Osaka is the kind of city where people notice when you are a bit lost or confused or in need and they come over to help. There is, in fact, a Japanese term for the people of Osaka — なれなれしい — narenare-shii, which means “overly familiar”.
I suspect it was meant as a derisive term the people of Tokyo gave to Osakans, as the folks in Tokyo seem to embrace a different, let’s say more introverted, lifestyle. I fell in love with the people of Osaka and their narenare-shii approach. They are very much aware of people around them and are willing to lend a helping hand.
Just before World War II, Osaka was the largest city in Japan and the 6th largest city in the world, as well as the largest manufacturing hub in Asia. Osaka has wonderful history and peace museums, and if you go through both of them you can intuit that the hard-working, generous, humorous and entrepreneurial citizens of this city were victims of the militarism which was developed by a military elite in Tokyo in the 1930s, which hijacked the national government and turned the entire country into a brutal war machine.
