On This Day: September 20, the house the sea took
On this day in 1498, the sea came for Kamakura.
The tsunami that followed the morning earthquake washed away the hall standing over the Great Buddha. It was the last of the buildings that had sheltered him; storms had taken the halls in 1334 and again in 1369, and both times they rebuilt.
This time they didn't. The statue is bronze, cast around 1252, thirteen metres of Amitabha sitting above the bay. The water went around him and pulled back and left him in the open.
He has been out there ever since. Five hundred and twenty-eight years of rain and sun, the 1923 earthquake, all of it, and he is still sitting.
The shelter was the part that didn't last.
☀️ Jane
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