Japan’s love affair with
Ferris wheels began more than a century ago in Osaka

First-time visitors to Osaka are often surprised by the sight of a deep-red Ferris wheel suddenly appearing above a 10-storey building among the skyscrapers near JR Osaka Station in Umeda.

Passengers board one of the wheel’s 52 gondolas inside Hep Five, a large retail mall, and are slowly carried to a peak 106m above ground. The Hep Five Ferris wheel is one of the first such rides in Japan to be installed not in an amusement park but in the heart of a city.

When the ride was built inside the Hep Five building in 1998, people were amazed by its eccentric location and eye-catching appearance.

While the world’s first Ferris wheel appeared in 1893 in Chicago, the first one in Japan was constructed in Osaka more than 100 years ago, at a time when the city was intoxicated by the nation’s recent victory in the Russo-Japanese War.

An advertisement for that attraction, dubbed the ‘Great Wheel’, features an illustration of the ride decorated with several Japanese flags. The advertisement was carried for an exposition held from April to June 1906 at Tennoji Park to commemorate victory in the war. The ride was one of the expo’s featured attractions.

According to a newspaper from the time, the English name ‘Ferris wheel’ was translated to Japanese as tenbo senkai sha (rotating wheel).

The ride was installed on high ground in the park, near the site of the current botanical garden. The steam-powered machine slowly lifted its 14 gondolas to an estimated peak of 18 to 20 metres above ground.

Yuko Fukui, author of a book about the history of Ferris wheels in Japan, said the machine was imported from either the United States or Britain.

The wheel’s operational debut was delayed until May, a month after the expo itself had begun, due to safety inspections and maintenance.

When the big day finally arrived, a musical band performed a congratulatory tribute as the Ferris wheel gave five-minute rides to 1,606 passengers.

A newspaper reported that one passenger had carried a bottle of sake onto the gondola and enjoyed a drink while gazing at the scenery that stretched below.

The Ferris wheel was dismantled sometime after the expo concluded on June 17, and what happened to it afterward is unknown. The ride was evidently popular, but people didn’t seem to have regarded it as a monument of lasting importance.

Enthusiasm for the Ferris wheel was soon replicated in eastern Japan, with the introduction of two Ferris wheels at the 1907 Tokyo Industrial Exhibition in the Ueno area.

Gubijinso (The Poppy), a novel from that era by renowned writer Soseki Natsume, contemplates the irony of passengers’ experience: "When a person in one gondola goes toward the blue sky, another one in a different gondola slowly goes down to the earth, which sucks (the experience) dry (of joy). The inventor of the Ferris wheel was a philosopher."

It was not until 2001 that Fukui’s research uncovered historical evidence regarding the ride in Tennoji Park. She began looking into the history of Ferris wheels after studying in the US.

Fukui’s book Kanransha Monogatari (Ferris Wheel History) offers a comprehensive look at the ride.

"People may have believed the two wheels in Tokyo were the nation’s first, because the Tokyo newspapers didn’t mention anything about the Osaka expo in their reporting," said Fukui. "It’s also possible that people didn’t realise the rides in Ueno were the same kind of machine that had appeared in Osaka, because they were promoted by different names."

Whereas the Osaka expo had trumpeted its tenbo senkai sha, the English term Ferris wheel (which is today translated as kanransha in Japanese) was in wide circulation by the time of the Tokyo event.

Around the same time as the Osaka expo, more than a decade after the ride’s international debut in Chicago, both the United States and Europe were in the grip of Ferris wheel fads.

Fukui speculates that the people responsible for bringing Ferris wheels to Osaka and Tokyo may have observed the rides while travelling overseas and imported the machines independently of each other.

Nowadays, the Ferris wheel is the subject of intense commercial competition. Although fast Ferris wheels designed for thrill seekers can be found in some countries, this is not the case in Japan.

Shinya Hashizume, 47, a professor of Osaka Prefecture University who specialises in urban development, said, "In Japan, the Ferris wheel has had a unique evolution as a slowly rotating viewing deck."

Under this philosophy, the biggest attraction of the ride is the expansive view that gradually opens up to passengers as a gondola approaches the top of the wheel.

"The landscape in Japan is best enjoyed by looking at it from above," said Hiroshi Matsukawa, 56, a sales department manager at Sanoyasu Hishino Meisho Corp, an Osaka-based firm that manufactured the Hep Five Ferris wheel.

Just like the novelist who saw the ride as a metaphor for human life, riding in the gondola may be a good chance to contemplate the ups and downs of our own lives.

- (ANN)