The Great Buddha of Kamakura sits today entirely in the open air, and this was never the original intent. When construction of the bronze statue began in 1252, it was housed inside a large wooden hall, following the conventional practice for a monumental temple image of this scale and importance, sheltered from weather the way most sacred bronzes of comparable stature elsewhere in Japan continue to be.
That original hall did not last. Typhoons destroyed it more than once over the following two centuries, and each time it was rebuilt by the temple community to shelter the statue again. The pattern ended for good in the late fifteenth century, when a tsunami swept the hall away entirely, along with whatever structure had most recently replaced the earlier storm-damaged versions. Rather than rebuilding a fourth time, the decision, made for reasons not fully recorded, was to leave the Buddha exposed to the elements, and it has remained that way for more than five centuries since.
The statue's hollow bronze interior, originally an accident of the casting process rather than a planned feature, has since become one of its most distinctive attractions: visitors today can pay a small fee to step inside and see the bronze casting technique and internal reinforcement structure directly, an intimate physical access to a thirteenth-century monumental sculpture that few comparably scaled bronze images anywhere in the world offer in quite the same way.