Kamakura Daibutsu (Kotoku-in)

A bronze Amida Buddha, 11.3 metres tall and weighing about 121 tonnes, cast in 1252 and sitting outdoors in a temple courtyard in Kamakura. It was not meant to be outdoors. A wooden hall covered it for two and a half centuries until storms took the roof twice and a tsunami in 1498 carried the building away for good. The statue stayed where it was and has been in the open air ever since, which is why it looks the way it does: weathered green, unroofed, against the trees.

It is hollow, and for 50 yen you can go inside. The interior shows the casting seams where the bronze was built up in stages, the marks of the original technique, and the steel reinforcement added in the 1960s to help it survive earthquakes. It is a strange and slightly claustrophobic five minutes and almost nobody bothers.

On the wall to one side hang a pair of straw sandals about 1.8 metres long. Children in Ibaraki have been making and sending them since 1951, on the idea that the Buddha might want to walk around Japan and would need footwear. They are replaced every few years.

Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about the statue, and an English notice at the gate asks visitors to remember they are standing in front of an object of worship.

Entry is around 300 yen. Hase-dera, five minutes' walk, has a wooden eleven-headed Kannon and a hillside view over the sea; doing the two together takes about two hours. Hase station on the Enoden line is a ten-minute walk, and the Enoden itself, a small tram-train running along the coast to Enoshima, is worth the ride on its own.