Tatzu Butzu: Golden Buddhas That Keep Growing

The installation originally comprised thirty-three figures, a number with significance in Buddhist tradition. Each belongs to its particular trunk.

A figure can look remarkably self-contained until your eye follows the wood beneath it. There is no separate pedestal. The tree continues down into the ground and out into the surrounding growth.

That living connection also makes maintenance part of the story. Growth can obscure a figure, and the trees remain vulnerable to damage. Becoming a Buddha does not appear to discourage insects.

A living sculpture also inherits the problems of being alive.

The people who make the work have to return to it. Sculptor Hideaki Mori, who participated in its creation, carved four of the figures anew during maintenance in 2024, according to Tsunagi Town’s account. The museum also reports that one figure has been removed because of insect damage, with restoration being planned.

Then there are the voices.

Faint human speech comes from cracks in some of the rocks. The mechanism is straightforward: speakers are concealed inside split stones. Knowing that explains the equipment. It does surprisingly little to make a speaking boulder feel ordinary.

The words belong to this region. The recordings include local residents reading poems by Michiko Ishimure, whose writing gave powerful expression to lives affected by Minamata disease. The disease was caused by eating fish and shellfish contaminated with methylmercury discharged from a chemical factory, as Japan’s Ministry of the Environment explains.

Alongside the poems are recordings of storytellers passing on the history of Minamata disease and sounds from a traditional local dance, as a curator’s account of the work describes.

That gives the quiet speech a different weight. These are human words placed in something we usually expect to outlast us: poetry, painful memories and the sounds of a community’s continuing life.