MAKOMANAI TAKINO CEMETERY: a place as peaceful as surprising

Makomanai Takino cemetery is singular place. Actually if the word « cemetery » wasn’t in the name, I would have never guessed it was one.

Reproductions of the Moai statues from the Easter Island, Stonehenge in England and an enormous Buddha are all together in there. A pretty funny mix!

The cemetery itself is farther away, isolated behing trees. To be honest, the place is so big that I hadn’t noticed the graves until the very end of the day, from the top of the Great Buddha hill. I didn’t have the time to go and check it out otherwise I may have missed my bus. I think that I would have needed at least 30min by walk to reach it. Actually, there are shuttles to go to the cemetery part.

To me, the only common point of this place with a cemetery is silence. A few visitors enjoy themselves, walk around, climb the hill but the atmosphere remains peaceful. There’s no hubbub.

At the entrance around 40 Moai statues are aligned. Stonehenge reproduction stands a bit farther away. The real Stonehenge in England is still a mystery to this day. Unfortunately the one in Makomanai Takino cemetery is a poor reproduction of it. The stones stand on the top of the others with the help of little chocks they didn’t even try to hide.

I’ve never been to Stonehenge nor to the Easter Island so it was completely new for me to discover these monuments. Well, knowing that they were only reproductions, that they were not authentic I didn’t feel as much pleasure, astonishment or thrill as if they were the real ones. The charm didn’t work on me.

About the Great Buddha now. He was out in the wild, let’s say, until 2015. Unfortunately, instead of soothing the place, the 13,5meter high Buddha was making people anxious. Tadao Ando, the architect also known as the « king of concrete » (and he definitely is!), came out with the idea of a cupola to cover it up. Only the top of the head of the Buddha appears out of the cupola.
From the outside, the cupola looks like a hill on which 150000 lavenders were seeded.

I am not fond of concrete all around Buddha. Nevertheless, I have to admit that the lavender hill with Buddha’s heead coming out of it is beautiful and enigmatic. You want to know what’s hidden there. To find it out, you need to walk in a long tunel. At the end of it appaers Buddha immersed in the light.

To conclude, Makomanai Takino cemetery is pretty strange. It is a very peaceful place where you can spend an afternoon wandering around between Moai statues, Stonehenge and the Great Buddha. The environment is pleasant with its atypical field of lavender. Once again I think that, like everything in Hokkaido, the snow makes it more charming in winter.