S P O T ／ SPOT-090

Torii Kannon Mountain Sanctuary

鳥居観音とりいかんのん

In the Naguri mountains north of Hannō, a single Saitama businessman named Hiranuma Yatarō (1892-1979) spent decades of the postwar reconstruction era building his own private 300,000-tsubo (roughly 100-hectare) Buddhist mountain. The Torii Kannon complex includes a main hall, a great bell tower, a 13-story pagoda dedicated to the relics of the 7th-century Chinese monk Xuanzang (whose travels to India inspired Journey to the West), a 33-meter white Kannon of Salvation on the summit, a Peace Kannon, a Shaka Buddha image, and a network of pilgrimage paths winding among them all. Most of the structures are open during the warmer months (April-November, weekends and holidays); the summit Kannon contains an interior elevator and a viewing platform that overlooks the rolling Oku-Musashi hills. The project is somewhere between religious devotion and personal monument-building on an unimaginable scale — a postwar layman's act of faith expressed in concrete and bronze across a hundred hectares of forest. Visiting on foot, with the right amount of time, is the closest most people will come to entering one person's actual mental landscape.