Nara: where the deer bow back

Before Kyoto there was Nara, capital of Japan for most of the eighth century, and the scale of what got built then is still startling. Todai-ji shelters a bronze Buddha about fifteen metres tall inside one of the largest wooden buildings on earth — and the hall standing today is only two-thirds the size of the original. Behind it, a pillar with a hole cut at the base draws a queue of children convinced that squeezing through brings good luck.

Almost everything worth seeing sits inside Nara Park, and so do around a thousand sika deer. They are wild, protected as messengers of the gods, and many have learned to bow for a shika-senbei cracker — then to nudge, insistently, for a second one. The path from the park's edge climbs to Kasuga Taisha, a Shinto shrine hung with three thousand stone and bronze lanterns, the moss on them so thick it softens the whole approach. Kofuku-ji's five-storey pagoda, under restoration scaffolding until the 2030s, marks the other side, and the grassy slopes of Mount Wakakusa rise behind it all.

South of the park, Naramachi is a quieter Nara: former merchant townhouses with latticed fronts and long, narrow interiors, now sake shops, coffee counters and tiny museums. Nara is also where kakinoha-zushi comes from, mackerel sushi wrapped in a persimmon leaf, and where mochi is still pounded at ferocious speed by two men and a wooden mallet on Sanjo-dori. Most people come for half a day from Kyoto or Osaka; the ones who stay until the deer settle at dusk get the better version.