Sanjūsangen-dō ("Hall of Thirty-Three Bays") is one of the strangest and most overwhelming buildings in Japan: a wooden hall 120 metres long containing one thousand and one statues of the thousand-armed bodhisattva Kannon. The central image is a 3.3-metre seated Kannon by the great thirteenth-century sculptor Tankei; flanking it, in ten serried ranks, stand a thousand near-life-sized standing Kannons in gilt cypress wood, each subtly different, each said to bear the face of someone the visitor knows.
The hall and its statues survived a fire in 1249 and were largely the work of the Kei school of Buddhist sculptors over the following decade. A row of twenty-eight guardian deities — fierce, idiosyncratic, with eyes of crystal — stands in front of the Kannons and is arguably the artistic high point. Photography is forbidden inside. The hall opposite, almost incidentally, is the venue of the annual Tōshiya, Japan's most famous traditional archery contest, held every January.