Behold the Ushiku Daibutsu

Today we visited the world's tallest statue, which is of Buddha, in Ushiku (wiki Ushiku Daibutsu). It wasn't too far away from where we live, maybe an hour and twenty five minutes. It was pretty great, I gotta say, the highlight of our trip to Japan so far, I think. The thing is about 120 meters tall and was built in 1993. In person it's kind of ominous and imposing. I half expected it to come to life and start walking around like the Statue of Liberty in Ghostbusters 2. "Buddha SMASH!" Seriously though, it was a great experience. We got to go up inside it, where there is a museum and gift shop, among other spiritual rooms and artifacts. There was a room that housed hundreds of golden buddha statues that lined the walls like wallpaper. Outside the Buddha, there is a sort of park with flowers, craft and food shops, and a pond with some humongous fish (carp, I think) clamoring on the edge of the water for people to throw them some food pellets that you can purchase nearby. When we left the Daibutsu (Buddha in Japanese) we discovered that it was pouring down rain. Although we got soaked, that wasn't the lowlight of the day. On our way out we saw a crowd of people out of the rain under a tarp in front of a stage, so we decided to investigate. The "show" that was going on was a woman inducing two very sad looking monkeys on leashes into doing tricks for the amusement of the crowd. They were wearing shirts and looked very depressed, especially when one of the monkeys was forced to bow after he had jumped over a very high obstacle. The worst part was when one of the monkeys was sitting on a block off to the side waiting his turn. He turned his back to the audience as if he was too ashamed to look at them. The woman, seeing this, turned his block around so he would be forced to look at the audience, but still he tried to just look down. As depressing as that was, it didn't put a damper on the entire day, and we have now returned to our home area tired and hungry. Check out the pictures below!