鎌倉 Kamakura

The Great Buddha statue in Kamakura is one of those iconic images that for the whole world says "Japan," or even more than that, the exotic, the inscrutable Orient, the Other. To see it, you have to go through a gate and come around a corner, at which point for me a big gong goes off in my head like it's some airline commercial. But to Japanese, Kamakura is much more than an ad campaign. It was the site of the first shogun's government in 1192 (which Japanese remember with a little mnemonic device in which the numbers 1192 sound like the Japanese for "good country": イ・イ・ク・ニを作ろう、鎌倉幕府). The Kamakura Era only lasted about 150 years and by the time the shoguns set up their tent ("tents" referring to their militaristic origin, as if on a constant campaign) in Edo (the old name for Tokyo), Kamakura was a neglected backwater town. But the temples and shrines built in its heyday were kept up and those are pretty much what Kamakura is known for today. It's also just an hour's train ride from Tokyo, which facilitates a constant flow of tourists and their yen to preserve the old landmarks.

Here we are chumming with the Great Buddha, who was once inside a temple that blew down in a typhoon, so they built another temple, which blew down in another typhoon, so they built yet another temple, which washed away in a tsunami, at which point they said to themselves maybe this statue was meant to be outdoors. So, since 1498, he's been outdoors.

Here's a great mystery to me. This rather ordinary grave off the tourist circuit in Kamakura is that of Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first shogun of Japan. If you don't ask and you're not good with directions, you probably won't find it. I took this picture with past and future students of John Van Sant's Japanese history course at UAB. (Dr. Van Sant, does this give students extra credit?) Compare this to the gilded mausoleums of the Tokugawa shoguns at Nikko like this:

which we did not go to (image from Wikipedia), and it makes you wonder where the Kamakura shoguns went wrong, although Nikko is hardly fitting for guys that fancied themselves living in tents (which they did not). And this is just the entrance.