S P O T ／ SPOT-086

Echizen Daibutsu (Seidai-ji)

越前大仏（清大寺）えちぜんだいぶつ（せいだいじ）

In the mountains of Katsuyama, far enough from anywhere else that the first glimpse of it from the access road is genuinely startling, a 17-meter seated Buddha sits inside a colossal modern temple hall, surrounded by a 75-meter five-story pagoda, a long covered cloister, a stroll garden with ponds, and approximately 1,281 smaller Buddhas distributed across the precinct. The entire complex was built between 1987 and the early 1990s by a single individual — Tada Kiyoshi, the founder of a local taxi company — who funded the project from his own fortune with the explicit ambition of building a temple larger than Nara. He succeeded: the seated Buddha is several meters taller than the great Buddha of Tōdai-ji, and the surrounding pagoda is one of the tallest in Japan. The complex never achieved the visitor numbers it was built for, and there is now something melancholy and grand about wandering its enormous emptiness. With the recent extension of the Hokuriku Shinkansen to Fukui, the temple is being slowly rediscovered as one of the country's most concentrated examples of single-patron sacred architecture.