Day 15 - Boy, you sure have gotten bigger!

Kamakura, a small city to the south of Tokyo, was once the capital of Japan. But you wouldn't be able to tell from looking at the place. In fact, I would say that it is the smallest city I've been to so far. I pretty much walked the length of it in an hour.

Nevertheless, it still has its claims to fame: an overload of shrines and temples, touristy shops, and arguably its most famous attraction, the Daibutsu (literally, "Great Buddha"). The Daibutsu is a bronze statue of Amida Buddha, a Buddha worshiped heavily in Japan. It stands somewhere on the order of  13 meters, which would be somewhere around 40 feet but I hate the metric system so I don't know the exact conversion. Sue me, I'm American.

Instead of me telling you how big it is, I'll just show you a picture.

I'm going to go with, "really really big"

It is noteworthy that the Kamakura Daibutsu is only the second most famous in Japan. The first being the Daibutsu in Nara. This colossal meditating statue used to be covered in a wooden pavilion in the typical Buddhist style, but hundreds of years ago, after rebuilding it again and again after earthquakes, fire, and tsunami, I imagine the priests agreed that maybe it was meant to sit outside. So it does. I think it gives it a great look set against the trees under the open sky, though.

The statue is also hollow, and you can go inside of it. Inside is a plaque describing how it was built and later reinforced. Since it is so large, it was cast in 30 stages, and the stages were sort of welded together using three types of joints which are all visible on the inside of the statue. After the Daibutsu was named a National Treasure, a steel girder was placed inside to reinforce the structure in case of an earthquake. It is green, like the Statue of Liberty, because of oxidation.

The actual city of Kamakura is a shopping city with traditional and tourist wares alike. The same tourist  t-shirts available everywhere are found here, but so are traditional 'Kamakura carvings'. I personally chose to stop in and try the local flavor of soft serve ice cream: Sweet Potato. 

I know it sounds gross. But in Japan sweet potatoes are seen as a dessert item, rather than the way we treat yams, as a side dish at turkey dinners. So, it makes perfect sense for them to make it an ice cream flavor. After all, they also have green tea flavored ice cream, and that isn't a dessert item. 

The sweet potato ice cream was surprisingly good.

On my walk back to the train station (Kamakura is about four hours from Osaka by train) I also went to the Hachiman Shrine in Kamakura. Hachiman worship is an interesting phenomenon in Japan. Initially, Hachiman was neither "Shinto" or Buddhist. It was its own form of worship which, if I remember correctly, came from outside the country. Could be wrong though, it might have developed domestically. 

Hachiman is the god of War, or more precisely, of warriors. He is often depicted with a bow and arrow, and he has become both a Shinto kami (god), and a bodhisattva (enlightened servant of the Buddha). So, he is worshiped under the auspices of both Shinto and Buddhist worship, which makes him something of an oddity.  At any rate, his shrine in Kamakura is architecturally magnificent.

I made it bigger so you could see more closely.

Look at more pictures.

And I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Cory