Where the
Buddhas are.

In 752 the court at Nara dedicated a bronze Buddha almost 15 meters tall inside Tōdai-ji. Emperor Shōmu had ordered it nine years earlier as the centerpiece of a state that would be protected by Buddhism. The statue has been damaged and recast since then. The pattern it started is still visible in Japan’s official records.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists 2,743 sculptures designated as Important Cultural Properties, and 142 of them are also National Treasures. 500 are in Nara Prefecture, 430 in Kyoto and 381 in Shiga. Those three prefectures hold 48% of the country’s designated sculpture on about 3% of its land. Nara and Kyoto alone hold 118 of the 142 sculptural National Treasures.

The Agency’s category is sculpture, not Buddhas: it also covers Shinto figures, masks and portraits of monks. It is the only nationwide count of designated images by prefecture, so this map uses it and divides each prefecture’s total by its land area.

Capitals, patrons and fire

The concentration starts with where power sat. Nara was the capital from 710 until 784. Kyoto was the capital from 794, and the imperial court stayed there for more than a thousand years. Emperors, aristocrats and the great temples paid for images for centuries, and they did it close to home. Shiga borders Kyoto to the east, and the Tendai headquarters of Enryaku-ji sits on Mount Hiei, on the line between them.

Fire kept resetting the collection, and rebuilding added to it. In 1180 Taira forces burned much of Tōdai-ji, including the Great Buddha Hall. The monk Chōgen led the restoration, and in 1203 a team under the sculptors Unkei and Kaikei carved the two guardian kings of the Great South Gate, each more than 8.4 meters tall, in 69 days. They are National Treasures now. So is a great deal of the work made in the rebuilding that followed.

Survival also took care. In northern Shiga, around Nagahama, almost every village keeps a Kannon image. According to local tradition, when war reached the area, villagers sank their statues in riverbeds or buried them to save them from burning. Villagers still look after many of those halls themselves.

The prefectures with none

At the other end of the map, Kagoshima and Okinawa have no designated sculpture at all, and Hokkaido and Akita have one each.

Kagoshima’s zero was deliberate. When the new Meiji government ordered Shinto separated from Buddhism in 1868, most of Japan stopped at separation. The Satsuma domain went further. It destroyed its temples and Buddhist images and burned scriptures. According to Kagoshima Prefecture’s own history, for several years there was not a single temple or monk in the domain. Its great temples, including Fukushō-ji, the Shimazu family temple, were never rebuilt.

Okinawa’s losses came later. Enkaku-ji, the Ryukyu kings’ Zen temple beside Shuri Castle, was founded in 1492. Its buildings were designated National Treasures in 1933 and destroyed in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Hokkaido was settled by the Japanese state mostly after 1869, long after the great age of temple sculpture.

A map of what was saved

The count is also a record of modern choices. After the Meiji campaign against Buddhism, officials began surveying temple treasures. In 1884 the scholars Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzō persuaded the monks of Hōryū-ji to unwrap the Yumedono Kannon, a seventh-century figure kept hidden in hundreds of meters of cloth. In 1897 the Ancient Shrines and Temples Preservation Law created the first National Treasure designations. Laws in 1929 and 1950 replaced it, but the idea stayed the same: the state lists what it has decided to protect.

That explains Tokyo’s place, second by density. The Agency counts objects where they are kept, and Tokyo is where many museums and collectors keep them. Its bright color on the map comes from its collections, not from centuries of temple building.