S P O T ／ SPOT-077

Hotei Daibutsu (the Sunglasses Buddha)

布袋の大仏ほていのだいぶつ

In a quiet residential block in Kōnan City, an 18-meter concrete Buddha sits in the front yard of an ordinary suburban house. The Hotei Daibutsu was built between 1949 and 1954 by Maeda Hidenobu, a local acupuncturist who experienced a dream in which the Buddha appeared to him and asked to be made physical. Maeda spent five years and most of his savings building the figure on his own land, two meters taller than the Great Buddha of Nara, and the statue has now sat sandwiched between a railway level-crossing and an ordinary street ever since — possibly the largest private-individual-commissioned Buddha in Japan. In recent years the figure has gone viral on Japanese social media under a new name: the 'Sunglasses Buddha,' because the warning lights of the adjacent railway crossing, when activated, align almost exactly with the Buddha's eyes and appear to give him a pair of glowing rectangular shades. The phenomenon is best photographed at sundown when a train is due. The Buddha remains a private structure on residential property; observe from the public road only, do not block the crossing, and remember that you are, in effect, photographing a stranger's front garden.