SENDAI--Hundreds of hand-carved Buddhist statues are to be presented to parents who lost children in the Great East Japan Earthquake.
SENDAI--Hundreds of hand-carved Buddhist statues are to be presented to parents who lost children in the Great East Japan Earthquake.
People bereaved in the disaster, as well as ordinary citizens, have spent months making the palm-sized statues.
About 1,000 statues have been created at special sessions overseen by artisans. The statues will be presented to grieving parents after a memorial service at Zuiganji temple in Matsushima, Miyagi Prefecture, to be held March 6.
Mutsumi Tomita, 34, a Buddhist sculptor living in Kyoto, started the project after rejecting the idea of presenting “ihai” (mortuary tablets) to the families.
Tomita said he saw many posters asking for information about missing people when he worked as a volunteer in the Ishinomaki and Onagawa areas of Miyagi Prefecture in early June.
“If I present ihai now, that will be a message requiring those (who are looking for missing people) to accept their deaths,” Tomita recalled thinking. Donating the Buddhist statues does not require such acceptance.
Tomita, whose first child was about to be born when the March 11 quake struck, started the project with young Buddhist priests across Japan and has held statue-carving gatherings in Kyoto, Kanagawa, Fukuoka and even in New York. He organized several sessions in Miyagi Prefecture.
On Feb. 23, about 70 people took part in a workshop in Zenshoji temple in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, with participants spending about five hours under the instruction of Buddhist statue sculptors and Buddhist priests creating their statues.
Some of those present had been bereaved in the disaster. Yasuko Tashiro, 68, carved a statue for a relative, a senior high school student, who died in the March 11 disaster.
“It is difficult to make a perfect statue. But I want to present it to his mother,” she said.
Sotai Oda, 31, one of the project’s organizers, said he could not forget one woman from Shiogama, Miyagi Prefecture, at one session.
She fumbled with her mobile phone and displayed a photo of her grandchild on the screen. “I want to make this face,” she said. The woman was weeping as she started carving.
“But around the time when the statue was completed, a smile returned to her face. We hope that people like her can ease their sadness through these Buddhist statues,” Oda said.
Tomita and other project members plan to continue the sessions after the March memorial service, and are considering expanding into Iwate and Fukushima prefectures.