S P O T ／ SPOT-047

Izu Gokurakuen (Izu Paradise Garden — Hell and Heaven Dioramas)

伊豆極楽苑いずごくらくえん

Since 1986, the family-run Izu Gokurakuen has been offering visitors a guided tour through Buddhist hell and heaven rendered in roughly 300 life-sized dioramas. The eight great hells of Buddhist cosmology — with their specific torments for specific sins — are reproduced with a specificity and conviction that suggests the creators took their theological brief seriously, even as the homemade quality of the execution gives the whole enterprise a warmth that professional production would have destroyed. Enma Daiō (the Great Judge of the Dead) sits in his courtroom; the River Sanzu divides this world from the next; sinners undergo their appointed punishments with a range of expressions from anguished to resigned. A secondary exhibit, restricted to visitors over 18, covers erotic Buddhist cosmology in a register that connects the facility to the hihoukan tradition of Shōwa-era resort entertainment. The combination — hell, heaven, and the taxonomy of human desire, all in a single family-run facility fifteen minutes from Shuzenji hot spring — is a capsule statement about the range of things Japanese folk religion has always been able to hold simultaneously.