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.
The people of Osaka were and are entrepreneurial in spirit and not at all bellicose. They remind me very much of the hard-working and kind working-class folks I grew up with in Chicago. Like Chicago, Osaka has a reputation for kind and funny people, producing some of Japan’s best comedians. In Osaka when I was asked where I came from, I often quipped that I was born in the Osaka of the USA.
World War II changed the trajectory of Osaka as the military took the number one production center in Asia and forced it to convert to war production, compelling the US Army Air Forces to bomb it repeatedly. At the Osaka Peace Museum, a vintage classroom is presented showing how militarization even took over the Japanese schoolchild’s experience during WWII. So Osaka is not as hugely significant as it used to be, but it is still vital to Japan’s current economy. And the good-will nature of Osakans also survived the war. But I want to talk about Billiken now.
Like all really good gods, Billiken comes from a far-away place. Mithras, Isis and even Jesus were worshipped in ancient Rome in part because a foreign origin gave some sense of mystery and exoticism to these deities. Billiken also has this foreign sense of exoticism as he was conceived by an art teacher named Florence Pretz in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. He came to her in a dream. She named him Billiken after the name of an elfin person waiting for the moon to visit earth in a poem by Bliss Carman. Pretz liked drawing chubby little impish figures, which her dream figure resembled, and soon she designed and patented an image of the god.
A company in Chicago began to make little Billiken figurines as good luck charms, but kept their tongue in cheek by claiming in ads that the Billiken was more lucky than a rabbit’s foot in the back pocket of the seventh son of a seventh son. They also started calling him “The God of Things as They Ought to Be”.
So Billiken was to be a lucky charm that mocked the concept of a lucky charm but still hopefully functioned as a lucky charm. This was the type of humor Osakans could appreciate and in 1912 a statue of Billiken was installed in Luna Park, near the still famous Tsutenkaku Tower. These days you see Billiken all over the Shinsekai district.
Thinking of Billiken as a token of good fortune, or as a god, is like joking about something that most likely doesn’t exist, but you dearly wish it did. We know that our actions are often not what they ought to be – we should be able to control our temper, our aggression, our egocentricity and be kind and patient, show forgiveness, show mercy, engage others with love and respect and engage the world on a meaningful level, but it is often hard to do this. Positive self-change might even begin to seem like an illusion after a while, something we still believe in without fully believing in.
With Billiken, we have something not especially serious to look to that might help us. We do and don’t expect its help at the same time. Billiken is the friendly, non-threatening, joyous and goofy savior we can turn to while pretending we are turning to him as an ironic joke.
His oversized ears are like those of Ganesh. They allow him to hear needs and requests. Finally, he is sitting and showing the soles of his feet to you. Billiken knows that you know that he is showing his soles to you to show how comfortable he is with us. In some religions the head is the apex while the feet represent “the lowest”. That part of him that touches the ground is the part we rub on Billiken for our good luck.
Billiken is the god who looks and pretends to be too goofy and frivolous to be useful, purely in order to serve us better as a god who can get us to where we ought to be socially and personally, even if we do not want to seriously seem as if we wish for this, while seriously wishing for this.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Author
