Sanjūsangen-dō

Leave your shoes at the door, step into one long hall, and 1,001 golden figures stand waiting: a single great seated Kannon (the bodhisattva of compassion) and 1,000 more ranked around it, row behind row, into the dim. No two of those 1,000 faces were carved alike. This is Sanjūsangen-dō, “thirty-three bays”, the longest wooden building in Japan, and people have long come to search those faces for one they have lost.