A hard land

A boy, given a new hammer, quickly comes to see all nouns as variations on the nail. For him, there are few problems for which a pounding solution cannot be found. I feel like Japan's relationship with concrete must be based on a similar principle. They started with perfectly normal things: sidewalks, buildings, bridges. Then, like a man who's still enjoying using his chainsaw but has already cut down the tree he bought it for, the Japanese realized there were all kinds of things that needed to be poured. Not enough wood or metal? We'll pour the telephone poles! Rock slides getting you down? Paved mountainsides don't slide, baby! Flooding? What could be more logical than paving the riverbed?

And after the war, when they wanted to erect a statue of the Buddha of Compassion in memorial to the unknown dead of the Pacific conflict, do you think they carved it from stone? Cast it from bronze? Forget it, dude - they did that in Kamakura and Nihonji, and it was totally hard work and stuff. Behold: the Ryozen Kannon.



And to be perfectly honest, it's quite lovely from a distance. When you get up close, though, it looks pretty cheap, like something a gas-station owner built on the side of the highway in the fifties to attract customers. Or like a prop for some weird chain of restaurants.

"Buddha Burger: we'll make you one with everything."