I’ve seen the Statue of Liberty three times: once in New York (on Liberty Island), once in Paris (on the Île aux Cygnes, an artificial island in the Seine River) and once in Tokyo (on Odaiba Island).
What a strange, disorienting experience it is, seeing a landmark from one place suddenly transplanted to a completely different location, country and culture.
As mentioned above, Japanese isn’t the only country doing it, but they do seem to have a particular enthusiasm for the act. I’ll never forget, for example, my visit to the Otsuka Museum in Shikoku (Wow Place #4), a building housing hundreds of exact representations of the world’s greatest pieces of art. Want to see the Mona Lisa? There it is. How about Andy Warhol’s Sunflowers? Absolutely. The Sistine Chapel? Step right up, folks.
In short, there’s a precedent for this kind of thing in Japan, appropriate culture from abroad and making it one’s own. Nevertheless, on a visit to Makomanai Takino Cemetery in Sapporo, I find myself unprepared for the sight of dozens of Moai Easter Island statues! Mammoth in scale, the statues line the roadway leading to the cemetery. Next to them is a replica of one of the Assyrian winged lions you find at the British Museum. And just down the road, what else but a full-scale Stonehenge?!!
What is going on here?
As much as I try, I can’t actually get anyone at the cemetery to elucidate me. Essentially, “The monuments are just here…what’s the problem?” About the only real clue I do find is from the cemetery’s website, which declares, “There is a lot of the world’s famous architecture and statues in the cemetery. They honor the spirits of our ancestors, bless all people and connect proof of our life to future generations.”
I can’t argue with that.
Interestingly, the highlight of my visit isn’t the foreign-based art and architecture, but a homegrown structure: “The Hill of the Buddha.”
Designed by top Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the shrine features a 44-foot tall statue of the Buddha, encircled by an artificial hill planted with 150,000 lavender plants. Seen from a distance, the Buddha seems to be peaking his head out of the hillside to see what’s going on in the neighborhood. As you come closer, you discover that the statue is the center of a round rotunda, accessed via a collecting pool and a 131-foot cement tunnel. The rotunda, of course, is without a roof so the Buddha can catch some rays and check out area.
The reason only the head is visible from a distance, says Ando, is because “Our imagination is piqued by what we cannot see.” The Hill of the Buddha is certainly an ethereal site. While here, you can also take part in several Japanese spiritual practices—like writing a wish on a wooden placard called an ema, finding out your fortune by taking a slip of paper called an omikuji, or wrapping a candle with a message to express a wish.
Clearly, the Buddha statue is a living monument, the locus of a spiritual practice.
To be honest, I leave the Makomanai Takino cemetery a bit conflicted. This is a place of worship and reflection, right? So what’s with the crazy statues that draw in tourists (like me) by the droves? Was the intention to bring in gawking visitors or to honor the deceased?
The answer seems to be…both.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned on my many trips to Japan, you don’t have to understand everything. Sometimes it’s fine to just shake your head and think, “Those crazy, baffling, wonderful Japanese!” and leave it at that. If it works for the locals, that’s good enough for me.
(Sometime back, a friend of mine was having trouble with his girlfriend and asked me, “Why is she angry at me? It’s not logical!” No relationship expert, I answered his question with another question: “Do you really need to know the ‘why?’” If an emotion is real for another person, then we must assume it has an internal logic –for them. Why is there a Stonehenge in a cemetery in Japan? Why is my partner frustrated at me? Just because. As the entrepreneur, Philip Henslowe, states repeatedly in the movie Shakespeare in Love, “It’s a Mystery!” Quite often in life, honoring the experience without trying to change anything or get an answer is the better part of valor.)