The MI6 attack of September 2000 remains unsolved to this day, which is a quietly unsettling detail for a building full of people whose job is to find things out. And the Great Buddha of Kōtoku-in has been sitting in the open air for over five centuries, which says something worth dwelling on about what endures.
The twentieth of September has, across the centuries, managed to combine a natural disaster, an unsolved act of terrorism, and several thousand people in alien costumes having a perfectly pleasant time in the Nevada desert. History is nothing if not varied.
A Buddha Without a Roof
On 20 September 1498, the Nankai earthquake struck coastal Japan and sent a tsunami crashing into the shoreline. At Kōtoku-in temple, the wooden hall surrounding the Great Buddha was destroyed entirely. The forty-foot bronze statue survived. It has sat in the open air ever since, enduring over five centuries of weather and seismic activity without so much as a roof above it. The building is gone; the statue is unmoved. There is something quietly extraordinary about that.
Somebody Shot a Rocket at MI6
At midnight on 20 September 2000, a Russian-built RPG-22 anti-tank missile was fired at the MI6 headquarters in London, striking the eighth floor. The building sustained damage. Nobody was injured. The attack has never been solved, which is a detail that probably keeps certain people awake at night, given that the building in question is supposed to be full of people whose entire job is to find things out.
The Internet Went to the Desert
On 20 September 2019, thousands of people gathered near Area 51 in Nevada, following through on a viral Facebook event that had proposed storming the classified US military facility to find the aliens. Around two million people had clicked attending online. In person, the numbers were considerably smaller, the agenda had shifted, and the day ended with festivals rather than trespassing on a heavily secured government installation. As collective acts of internet bravado go, it resolved rather wholesomely.
Three Events, One Calendar Square
A medieval Japanese catastrophe, an unsolved attack on British intelligence, and a desert party that began as a meme: nothing connects these except the date. That is precisely what makes it interesting. History does not arrange itself into tidy themes. The full episode covers all three in about ten minutes, and if the Great Buddha story does not make you want to look up a photograph of that statue sitting serenely in the open air, I am not sure what will.