You cannot hide the crackers. They will find the crackers.
“Oh, hey, deer,” you say, casually, noting two deer. Less than a second later, you look to your left and see a deer standing in the middle of a four-lane crosswalk, staring directly at you. This is Nara. Draw a right triangle where Kyoto & Osaka are the acute angles, and Nara is the right angle. It’s in the same mountain range as Kyoto. It was the capital of Japan for a little while, and then the capital moved to Kyoto. It burned down a bunch of times, some accidental, some natural, some deliberate.
And now there are deer, thousands of deer. There is a general perimeter to where the deer roam; you don’t see many of them in the town proper. But there are parks, shrines, and temples to the east, near the mountains, and suddenly the deer are everywhere. You get off the train, walk east, see a park, and a few vendors are selling stacks of crackers for ¥200, which is about $1.25USD. The deer have been trained to bow for crackers, and you must put your hands up to show you don’t have any. If you fail to comply, they will take matters into their own hands.
Within minutes, you watch a child screaming, running away from a half-dozen of them. You walk past multiple signs warning that the deer kick, that they are capable of injury. You joke that if you ever buy crackers, you will run to the train station, head through the gate, and throw the whole stack behind you, watching as they engage in a zombie-movie-grade feeding frenzy. You never want to buy the crackers, but you do want the deer to live. Hundreds bow at you while you’re in Nara.
You would think that turning your peaceful city into the world’s largest petting zoo would be a tourist thing, and you’re not fully wrong. The deer really do depend on tourist activity to live. At the beginning of the pandemic, when Japan was closed to foreigners and travel was highly restricted, the deer resorted to drastic measures, and many died. Now that Japan has reopened and is thronged with tourists on a level that it’s never seen in its history, the deer population has exploded again.
The deer have a purpose: they are considered the sacred messengers of one of the four gods that is enshrined at Kasuga Taisha, which is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.
I’ve learned a lot about Shinto in my life, and I will not claim to understand it on a level that seems remotely appropriate, but I will say that Japan’s insistence on connecting their spiritual practices to natural beauty is deeply resonant with me. I grew up nursing a deep distrust of organized religion, but my grade school was surrounded by a forest on three sides, so I was having spiritual experiences in nature all the time without being able to reliably identify them as such. I think spirituality would have made a lot more sense to me if the most venerated places were essentially public parks, open 24/7, where the structures frequently get rebuilt, instead of something more manmade.
There are a few shrines across the country that are ranked above others, having longer traditions, enshrined bigger-deal kami, etc. Ise is considered the biggest-deal one given its connections to the imperial household, but everything else is up for grabs. Kasuga has always been in the top tier of them.
You walk along a winding path that goes slowly uphill, lined on both sides with thousands of stone lanterns. Deer wander among the lanterns, and in my visits they tended to be a lot calmer than the ones who demand crackers in the park. Every physical surface – lanterns, trees, path – is covered in moss. You get to the shrine, and inside is thousands more lanterns, sponsored by different businesses & people across the country, which are lit a few times a year for the shrine’s biggest festivals A thousand-year-old-tree grows through one of the structures. All of this abuts a primeval forest where humans are forbidden, and wilder deer roam.
I put Nara on the last day of our trip not because of the deer, necessarily, but because of the walk, the moss, the lanterns, the forest. We, a pair of humans who are great at never shutting up, both quieted down as we approached, and we didn’t talk much for a few hours. In a place of like that, really you can just walk slowly, stare, witness.