Nara

We piled onto the train to Nara, the first Imperial city and one I'd never heard of before researching for this trip. When we arrived, we were greeted by the city's mascot, adopted for the 1300th anniversary of the city's founding as an Imperial center, a cartoon Buddha with antlers sticking out of his head. Nara, it turns out, is home to the world's largest wooden building, a temple to Buddha, and the sacred deer which surround it.

By fortune, we managed to just miss the annual deer mutilation festival, where the priests chase down the deer, hold them down, and cut off their antlers. Still, as we walked in the park approaching the temple, the fawns wandered along the pathways (the deer have free reign), trying to get tourists to feed them the cookies that vendors sell for that very purpose. The older deer, with their shorn nubs, tend to be more skittish, though they can be coaxed to come over for a cookie before scooting off to a distance. The deer make a sound when begging for a cookie that I can only liken to a baby's wail crossed with a dog's bark. It's not upsetting so much as damn weird to hear that erupting from all directions and distances.

The main temple is the most impressive thing I've seen in Japan so far. There are others more beautiful or ornate, but the sheer immensity of the building is flabbergasting. Inside is is a seated bronze Buddha holding up a hand that's the size of a grown man (which made me ponder and lament the loss of Phidias' Zeus at Olympia...idiot Christians...or the Bamiyan Buddhas...stupid Muslims) and even so it pales to the temple's size. 160' may not sound like a lot, but wow.