Nara Park
Sprawling sacred park where over a thousand free-roaming deer wander among ancient temples and lantern-lined paths.
This guide to Nara Park opens on an October morning with ten men called seko cornering a wild stag inside a fenced ring, a velvet-antler ceremony that has run every fall for three and a half centuries after local officials started it to stop rutting bucks from goring people. It traces the deeper legend behind it, of a god who rode a white deer down from Ibaraki to settle at nearby Kasuga Taisha, and follows the roughly twelve hundred deer who still share these six hundred sixty hectares with visitors today. It also reaches south toward Todai-ji, where an Indian priest and ten thousand monks once gathered around a bronze Buddha.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.