Stop the presses! According to some of this blog’s more persnickety readers, the creature in the previous post was in fact a deer. Your blogger has never claimed to be an expert in taxonomy, and did not even know that deers and yaks were related.

Point being that you can find darn near anything wandering the streets—deer, yaks, moas, poodles, you name it—so it pays to be careful.

Anyway, these friendly mammals are all over the place in Nara, and they’re friendly mainly because people keep feeding them, which they’re able to do because there are stands everywhere selling crackers to feed to the deer. And it will not surprise you to learn that there is a temple involved.

So people flock to Nara to see the deer (and the temple) and spend money to feed the deer.

This also provides jobs for industrious citizens.

The temple, Todai-ji, is billed as the largest wooden structure in the world, even though it isn’t anymore. And it contains the largest Buddha statue in Japan.

I haven’t seen any other Buddha statues to compare it to, but it does indeed seem pretty large. There’s another statue next to it, which is not as large, but is still pretty large. You would probably comment on how large it was if the Buddha statue weren’t even larger.

Also, there’s a gift shop In the temple.