Nara

The court established its first permanent capital here and then moved away again within a lifetime. The great temples stayed. Because the city never went on to become a major commercial or military centre, it was never comprehensively rebuilt over, and it was not bombed in the twentieth century — so what stands includes timber structures generally accepted as the oldest surviving anywhere in the world.

That is the frame worth carrying around the park: you are not looking at old buildings in an old city, you are looking at what was left when the political weight moved on. It also explains the scale. The main hall of the great temple is a reconstruction at roughly two-thirds of the original width and is still enormous, which tells you something about what the eighth-century court was willing to spend on a capital it then walked away from.

One day for the park, two for the prefecture, and the gap between those two numbers is where all of Nara's interest lies. The city park with the deer, the great bronze buddha and the shrine on the hillside is genuinely a single day, and it is forty-five minutes from Osaka and an hour from Kyoto, so most visitors do exactly that and leave.

The second day should go to Asuka or Yoshino. Asuka, thirty to forty minutes south by private railway, is where the Japanese state was assembled in the sixth and seventh centuries, and it is now farmland with burial mounds and stone figures in it, best seen by rented bicycle. Yoshino, about ninety minutes south, is a mountain ridge of cherry trees and a pilgrimage centre.

Three days lets you reach the Kii mountains and the pilgrimage routes, which are a serious commitment and mostly belong to Wakayama.

Kintetsu-Nara Station is closer to the park and Todaiji than JR Nara, and Kintetsu limited expresses reach it in about 35 minutes from Osaka-Namba and 35 from Kyoto — so day-tripping from either city is straightforward. The main sights, from Kofukuji through Todaiji to Kasuga Taisha, are a single walk of a couple of kilometres. Horyuji is on the JR Yamatoji line with a short bus at the end. Yoshino is the long one: about an hour and a half from Osaka by Kintetsu, then a ropeway or a climb. The Asuka countryside is best by rental bicycle from Asuka Station. Buses into the southern mountains are sparse.

The animals in the park were regarded as messengers of the shrine deity and were protected for centuries under penalties that were, at various points, extremely severe. There are well over a thousand of them and they are not tame, kept or fed by anyone — they are wild animals that have learned that people carry food.

Behave accordingly and everyone has a better time. Buy the official crackers if you want to feed them, hold nothing back once they know you have some, and do not tease: they will push, and stags in the autumn rut are genuinely dangerous and are dealt with by having their antlers cut for exactly that reason. Keep paper maps and tickets out of reach, because they will be eaten. And go at first light if you can — the park before the coaches arrive, with mist on the pond, is the version worth the journey.

Yoshino during the cherry blossom, unless that is precisely the plan and it has been booked. Thousands of trees up a mountainside in sequence is one of the great sights in Japan and the small town at the top is overwhelmed for the two weeks it lasts.

Nara Park in the middle of the day, any day, is the other thing to avoid. The deer, the crowds and the coach parties concentrate between ten and three; the same park at seven in the morning, with mist on the pond and the deer moving between the trees, is a different place entirely. Summer is hot and the park has little shade.

Yoshino's cherries open in waves up the mountainside from the lower to the upper slopes across roughly two weeks in April, later than the city below. Nara Park's autumn colour peaks in mid to late November. The basin is hot and closed-in during summer, above 34°C in August, and cold in winter with January highs near 9°C — Yoshino gets snow. Two set-piece events are worth timing for: Omizutori at Todaiji, a fire rite running through the first two weeks of March, and the lantern lightings at Kasuga Taisha in early February and mid-August. Early morning in the park is when the deer are calmest.

Kakinoha-zushi is salted mackerel on rice wrapped in a persimmon leaf, invented in the mountains as a way of getting sea fish inland before refrigeration, and it is still the local packed lunch. Miwa, southeast of the city, claims the oldest somen tradition in Japan and hand-stretches the noodles in winter. Narazuke are vegetables pickled repeatedly in sake lees until they turn amber and taste faintly alcoholic. Yoshino makes kudzu into a thin, clear starch used for hot puddings and dumplings, best eaten in the mountain town where it is refined.

The private railway from Osaka and Kyoto reaches Nara, Asuka and Yoshino frequently and is faster than JR for all three. Nara's park is a walk from the station; Asuka is best on a rented bicycle from its own small station; Yoshino has a cable car up the ridge.

A car is worth it for the mountainous south — the Kii peninsula's interior, Totsukawa, the pilgrimage trailheads — where buses run a few times a day and distances are long. That is a genuinely remote part of Japan an hour and a half from Osaka, which is the most surprising fact about this prefecture.

A first visit should stay overnight rather than day-tripping from Kyoto, and the reason is the morning. Todai-ji opens early, the park is empty before the coaches arrive, and the walk up to Kasuga's stone lanterns through the forest at that hour is the best hour in the city. Nearly every visitor comes at eleven and leaves at four, which is the worst possible window.

A second visit is Asuka by bicycle. Burial mounds, carved stone figures nobody can fully explain, temples that predate the capital at Nara itself, and a landscape of rice fields and low hills you ride between. It is where the country began and it is almost entirely undeveloped, which is a very strange and good thing to encounter forty minutes from Osaka.