Nara (奈良) was Japan's first permanent capital. For a brilliant stretch of the 8th century, it was the centre of a young state that looked to China and embraced Buddhism. Today Nara is a calm city. Its great temples and its tame deer, which bow to visitors, lead you into one of the oldest layers of Japanese history. This is the era when Japan first took the shape we know today.
The first capital
In 710, the emperor's court settled at Heijō-kyō, where Nara stands today. Its planners laid the city out on a grid. They copied the capital of Tang China. For most of the next century, a time called the Nara period, the emperor ruled from here. The court worked hard to build a strong central state on the Chinese model, and Buddhism gave that state its spiritual backbone. In 794 the capital moved to Kyoto, and Nara became a quieter town of temples. Wars and fires struck it more than once in later centuries. Even so, some of the oldest wooden buildings on earth still stand in and around Nara.
The Great Buddha and the deer
The heart of Nara is Tōdai-ji, the temple of the Daibutsu (大仏). This giant bronze Buddha is about fifteen metres tall. Workers cast it in the 740s, and the whole nation joined the effort as an act of faith and a prayer for protection. Its wooden Great Buddha Hall is one of the largest wooden buildings in the world. Around it spreads Nara Park, famous for its more than a thousand free-roaming deer (鹿). Since ancient times, people have seen them as messengers of the gods, and today everyone loves them. The deer have learned to bow their heads for the special crackers that visitors buy to feed them. Nearby stand Kōfuku-ji, with its five-storey pagoda, and Kasuga Taisha. Thousands of stone and bronze lanterns line the paths of this shrine.
Words & idioms to take away
Idioms & proverbs to carry away
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鹿 (shika): deer. In Nara people regard them as sacred shinshi, "messengers of the gods." That is why they roam the city's park under protection.
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奈良の大仏 (Nara no Daibutsu): "the Great Buddha of Nara." Everyone calls the Tōdai-ji Buddha by this name, to tell it apart from the one in Kamakura.