S P O T ／ SPOT-231

Morioka Daibutsu (Shōon-ji)

盛岡大仏（松園寺）もりおかだいぶつ（しょうおんじ）

On a wooded hillside on the eastern edge of Morioka stands something most cities save for their ancient capitals: a bronze Great Buddha some 17 meters tall, weighing roughly 170 tons with its granite pedestal — large enough that the temple compares it to the famous Daibutsu of Nara. But this colossus has no medieval pedigree. Shōon-ji, the Sōtō Zen temple that holds it, was only founded in 1987, and the Buddha itself was consecrated in July 1999, cast and installed over about two months with the help of twelve Korean engineers at a cost of roughly 700 million yen. It is, in other words, a Great Buddha born in the Heisei era — a modern act of private devotion rather than a relic of deep history. Around its feet sprawls a second surprise: a forest of some 500 stone monuments, including a poetry stele tied to the beloved Iwate poet Kenji Miyazawa. The effect is uncanny in the gentlest way — a Nara-scale icon rising not over an old capital but over a quiet residential hillside, where a brand-new colossus and a thicket of memorial stones share the same patch of forest.