S P O T ／ SPOT-331

Gensoboji Temple

源宗坊寺げんそうぼうじ

Tucked into a hillside above the naval port of Kure, Gensoboji is a temple founded in 1906 by a wandering ascetic named Inada Gensobo — and almost everything you see here, he built himself. After years of austerities (he is said to have lived on tree roots and buds in a cave on the grounds), Gensobo vowed to heal the sick, and then, entirely self-taught, began bending rebar and troweling on mortar to make Buddhist statues. Roughly 35 of them now stand scattered across the slope — Yakushi the medicine Buddha, a four-armed Fudo Myoo, an eleven-headed Kannon, dragon kings, wind gods — about 13 of them his own work, painted in startling, saturated color. The centerpiece is a six-meter Fudo Myoo gazing toward Kure Bay, itself an "inner Buddha" that Gensobo meant to encase inside an even larger Shakyamuni. He never finished it: today only the giant's left hand and left foot remain on the hillside, an eerie monument to an unrealized vision. Crude and powerful in equal measure, the statues have been reappraised in recent years as a striking example of outsider art and handmade folk devotion.