Deer and More Deer in Nara

As another former capital of Japan, Nara has its fair share of temples and gardens. But when most people think of Nara, they immediately associate it with deer. Apparently one of the old emperors really liked deer, and decided to populate the city with his favorite animals, whose offspring have been living in Nara Park ever since.

Trying to eat my camera

Our hotel was conveniently located right next to Nara Park, and the moment we saw numerous deer walking around, resting on the grass, and harassing tourists. Scattered around the park were vendors selling Shika-Senbei, rice cakes made especially for feeding the deer. We bought several stacks of Senbei just for fun, and became instantly popular with the deer. They would totally surround whoever had the most rice cakes, then start bowing their heads repeatedly as a way of asking for food. Some of the more aggressive deer would go straight for the Senbei or start biting your clothes. Almost as interesting as feeding deer was people-watching in the park. Every so often you would see a particularly jumpy tourist who would freak out as soon as the deer got close to them and run away screaming, dropping all their rice cakes in the process. The deer were more than happy to clean up after them.

This guy was particularly popular with the deer

Within Nara Park are many historical points of interest. The Taishogu is one such point, probably the largest and most popular. One thing that sets the Taishogu apart is the sheer size of it. The entire gated area could easily fit a couple of football fields, and inside the main temple building was a massive Buddha statue roughly the size of a four story building. All the features were so big that even the massive hordes of tourists didn’t completely obstruct the views.

Taishogu temple

We spent the last part of the day visiting the Nara National Museum. I expected it to be on the scale of the National Museum in Taipei and was worried that an hour and a half would not be enough to see the whole museum, but it ended up being a smaller museum that you could finish in an hour or two. The exhibits mainly featured Buddhist art and artifacts. Most of the religious explanations went over my head, though I imagine it would be very interesting for someone in religious studies. There was an exhibit about how the massive Buddha statues were built, which did interest me. It’s impossible to find single blocks of wood large enough to make those statues, so they used multiple blocks of wood fastened to each other. They would then carve out the fine details from the entire wood assembly. In order to make a uniform finish and preserve the wood, they covered the entire statue in lacquer, smoothing out the statue and hiding the parting lines.

No pictures of the inside allowed, unfortunately

This morning we left Nara and the overly friendly deer behind. We are currently on our way to Koyasan, a temple village in the mountains, where we will stay a night in an actual operating temple. This will mark the most remote location we are visiting before we return to the big cities.

- MC 4/16