For 50 yen more you can go up inside the bronze: the statue is hollow and can be visited.
You pay 300 yen at the gate of Kōtoku-in, the temple that looks after it, and the daibutsu (the great bronze Buddha) is right there in the open: 11.39 metres, 121 tonnes, cast from 1252. The wooden hall that covered it was brought down by the wind in 1335 and nobody ever rebuilt it. For another 50 yen you go up inside the casting and look at the joins from the inside.
Bronze statue of a seated Amida, 11.39 metres tall and weighing about 121 tonnes, made of copper, lead and tin. Casting began in 1252 and the rest is unknown: no one knows who commissioned it or who made it. The hall that housed it fell twice, in 1335 and 1369, and since the fifteenth century the statue has stood uncovered; in 1486 a monk already recorded it as ‘without a building, seated in the open air’.
🚉 Hase · 8 min walk
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The bronze statue appears as a recognisable landmark: being bronze, it has not corroded even after humanity's 3,700 years of petrification.
Sources: anitabi.jp · kotoku-in.jp · ja.wikipedia.org · japan-heritage.bunka.go.jp · sub-culture-library.com (no longer reachable)
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