Ushiku Daibutsu

Yesterday, I went the Ushiku Daibutsu in Ushiku, about 1.5 hours away from Hokota. What is it? According to the Guiness Book of World Records (you know where this is going now right?), it’s “the tallest statue of a bronze statue of Buddah” in the world!

This f-ing thing is huge, standing at 120m tall! It’s 3 times the height of the Statue of Liberty and about 9 times the height of the Daibutsu in Kamakura.

Did I mention it’s huge? Yeah… you get the idea. Well, here are more fantabulous facts about the Daibutsu for you:

• 4000 tonnes of bronze
• the right hand is 18m long
• the head is 20m tall
• each eye is 2.5m wide
• the mouth is 4m wide
• the nose is 1.2m long
• and the ear is 10m long

Praise the Lord! I mean, Buddah!

You can also go inside! There’s an elevator that takes you up the insides of the Buddah. It’s like going up its rectum! Sorta… lol (I’m totally going to get smited for this)

Anyway, the initial elevator ride is creepy as hell. It’s completely dark with weak green LED lights on the ceilings and floors. There’s Japanese commentary during the ride. It felt like an elevator ride to hell as opposed to an elevator ride of enlightenment.

When you get off, it remains kinda creepy (and trippy). It’s still very dark and in the middle of the main room, there’s a golden Buddah on a pedestal with a strong spot light shining on it. The walls lined with LED waves and LED Buddahs that change colours. Very psychedelic…

Once past that room, the route leads to a room with the history and making of the statue. It’s all in Japanese but there are a lot of pictures so you can make out what the stories are. Once past the history portion of the route, there’s another elevator ride, one that takes you to the chest (observation deck). The view isn’t all that great as you can only see through small slits. Bleh. There are some treasures donated (?) from Thailand such as this golden Buddah statue…

… and two other golden things that I couldn’t take good pictures of. On the way down, there’s a circular hall that houses 3300 small Buddah statues, similar to the one that had the spotlight on it. Like this guy…

It was cool and creepy at the same time. So many statues of Buddah staring at you… Here, you can feel it too!

Ok, it’s not quite the same… When I walked through that room, it felt like my soul was being put in the rinse cycle of a washing machine. I guess I didn’t feel very comfortable. Maybe I have something to hide, or I’ve sinned or something. lol

Enough of Buddah, on to the good stuff!

As ridiculous as this may sound, behind the Buddah is a petting zoo! Yeah! They had wild bunnies and squirrels to pet and this guy!

It’s a Japanese mini-buta (buta=pig). I went to take a close-up and it thought my camera was food. What a pig! Literally! Seriously though, it almost became a disaster when it got too close to my camera. That brown stuff on the snout isn’t exactly chocolate if you know what I mean.

The squirrels were super-cute too. They just run up to you thinking you have food to feed them (in most cases is true). Japanese folk, especially the kids, love feeding the squirrels.

Unfortunately for them, I’m cheap and not Japanese and don’t have children so I didn’t buy any “squirrel food” for 100 yen to feed them. They still nibbled at my hand thinking it’s food though.

Silly pea brained squirrels…

After the petting zoo, there was a monkey act. The trainer had the monkeys do some interesting things like catch rings, ride a tricycle and this…

Pretty impressive. I certainly can’t balance on a ball let alone roll around on one. But then again, I’m not a trained monkey… Don’t even go there! Don’t even go there…

-will