Echizen Daibutsu

Seventeen metres of seated Buddha, which is two metres taller than the one at Todai-ji in Nara, sitting in a hall in a quiet corner of Katsuyama that hardly anyone visits. That contrast is the reason to come.

The temple, Seidaiji, was finished in 1987. A businessman from Katsuyama who had made a fortune in Osaka paid for the whole thing, reportedly tens of billions of yen, as a gift to his home town. He got a main hall the size of an aircraft hangar, 1,281 smaller Buddha images set into the walls around the great statue, a Chinese-style gate, and a five-storey pagoda that at 75 metres is taller than any historic pagoda in Japan. Then the visitors did not come, the money ran out, and the complex has spent decades in a slow financial decline that is part of the experience.

It is not a historic site and it does not claim to be. What it has instead is scale without crowds. You can stand alone in front of a Buddha bigger than Nara's, hear your own footsteps in the hall, and climb the pagoda for a view over the Kuzuryu valley. On a weekday in winter the place can feel abandoned.

Entry is around 500 yen. It is a fifteen-minute walk or a short taxi ride from Katsuyama Station on the Echizen Railway, and the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum, which is genuinely first-rate and always busy, is ten minutes away by car. Doing both in one day is the standard plan, and the contrast between them is stark.