Nara (奈良) was Japan's first permanent capital, and for a glorious 8th-century moment the centre of a new, Buddhist, continental-facing state. Today it is a calm city whose great temples and tame, bowing deer draw visitors into one of the oldest layers of Japanese history, the era when the country first took the shape we recognise.
The first capital
In 710 the court settled at Heijō-kyō, on the site of modern Nara, laid out on a grid modelled on the Tang Chinese capital. For most of the century that followed, the Nara period, this was the seat of the emperor and the engine of a determined effort to build a centralised state on continental lines, with Buddhism as its spiritual backbone. The capital moved to Kyoto in 794, which spared Nara the later centuries of war and left its earliest monuments unusually intact; several survive as some of the oldest wooden buildings on earth.
The Great Buddha and the deer
Nara's centrepiece is Tōdai-ji, a temple built to house the Daibutsu (大仏), a colossal bronze Buddha over fifteen metres high, cast in the 740s as a national act of devotion and protection. Its wooden Great Buddha Hall is one of the largest timber structures in the world. Around it spreads Nara Park, famous for its more than a thousand freely roaming deer (鹿), regarded since ancient times as messengers of the gods and now a beloved fixture. They have learned to bow their heads for the special crackers sold to feed them. Nearby stand Kōfuku-ji with its five-storey pagoda and Kasuga Taisha, its paths lined with thousands of stone and bronze lanterns.
Words & idioms to take away
Idioms & proverbs to carry away
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鹿 (shika): deer; in Nara they are treated as sacred shinshi, "divine messengers," which is why they roam protected through the city's park.
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奈良の大仏 (Nara no Daibutsu): "the Great Buddha of Nara," the way the Tōdai-ji Buddha is universally known, distinguishing it from Kamakura's.