S P O T ／ SPOT-083

Sendai Daikannon (100-meter White Kannon)

仙台大観音せんだいだいかんのん

On a hillside in suburban northern Sendai, a 100-meter white Kannon — the bodhisattva of compassion — rises out of the woods, visible from the Tōhoku Expressway and from JR train windows kilometers away. Completed in 1991 to commemorate the centennial of the city of Sendai, the figure is among the tallest statues in the world, with 21 additional meters of structure descending below ground inside the base. Visitors enter through what is unmistakably a dragon's mouth — the pedestal entrance is shaped as a vast dragon swallowing the pilgrim — and ascend the interior via elevator and spiral staircase, passing through stacked galleries that hold the Twelve Zodiac Guardian Buddhas, the Thirty-Three Forms of Kannon, and the One Hundred and Eight Womb Buddhas in carefully arranged tiers. The cumulative effect is a complete, walk-through Buddhist cosmology compressed inside a 100-meter white statue at the edge of a Japanese suburb — one of the country's purest examples of postwar 'colossal religious landmark' culture, still active as a place of pilgrimage and increasingly photographed as a piece of weird modern architecture.