← All articles · Japan · 15 April 2024

Nara, Japan: The deer bow, and then they mug you

A day trip from Osaka to Nara in cherry blossom season, where 1,200 wild deer bow for crackers and then help themselves to whatever else you’re holding.

We drove over from Osaka in mid-April, which turned out to be the right week: the cherry blossom was still up, the sun was out, and the deer were everywhere. Nara was Japan’s capital in the eighth century, and the deer have been part of the place for about as long.

A young sika deer in close-up in Nara, looking sideways at the camera with soft light on its face — They’re wild animals, they just don’t behave like it.

Getting to Nara from Osaka

The train is the easy way. The JR Yamatoji line runs from Osaka Station to JR Nara in about 50 minutes, and the Kintetsu Nara line from Osaka-Namba takes about 40, so if you’re starting in Namba take the Kintetsu. There’s a Kintetsu bus too if you’d rather sit still for longer. It works as a day trip either way.

A quiet road in Nara lined with white walls and trees, leading towards green hills with a temple roof in the distance — The walk in from town, with the hills at the end of the street.

A traditional Japanese temple building in Nara with a tiled roof, behind a clipped pine and a stone-edged garden path — Nara has a lot of this. It was the capital once, and it shows.

Why the deer are here

They’re not a tourist attraction that got out of hand. In Shinto they’re treated as messengers of the gods, and the story goes that Takemikazuchi-no-mikoto turned up in the new capital riding a white deer. They’ve been protected ever since, and harming one is still a serious offence.

A yellow and black road sign in Nara showing a leaping deer, standing at a pedestrian crossing near the park — Deer crossing signs, because they use the roads as well.

The bowing

The bow isn’t trained. They do it when they think a cracker is coming, and they do it hard, at speed, from about a metre away. Buy a stack of shika senbei from one of the vendors and you’ll find out how quickly a polite animal becomes an impatient one.

Dileep in a striped polo shirt holding out a deer cracker to several sika deer under white cherry blossom in Nara park — The first cracker goes well. It’s the second one that draws a crowd.

Inga in a red cardigan feeding a deer that has stretched its neck up towards her hand, cherry blossom overhead — Blossom above, deer below, and a cracker that lasted about a second.

Inga in a red cardigan standing in a car park in Nara surrounded by four deer pressing in from both sides — This is the bit nobody warns you about. They know you’ve got more.

A deer in Nara nibbling at Inga’s hand and bag while she walks along a stone path, a school group passing behind — Not aggressive, just extremely direct.

Worth knowing

There are over 1,200 deer in the park. The crackers sold on site are made for them, so don’t feed them anything else, and keep maps and tickets out of reach because they’ll take those too. Go early if you want photographs without a hundred people in them.

The rest of that trip runs through Osaka and Kyoto, and if you want Japanese animals doing something stranger still, the snow monkeys at Jigokudani bathe in a hot spring. Everything else is on our Japan page.