Likely wanderer from Nara Park won’t be going back, but has a new place to live in a hot spring town.

Both the business and academic year start in spring in Japan, so right now is what’s known as the shin seikatsu, or “new lifestyle,” season, as new workers and college students move into new commuting-distance homes to start the next chapter of their lives. However, one new Osaka resident who just moved into a new place isn’t a university freshmen or a new corporate recruit, but a deer.

Last month, a deer was found wandering the streets of Osaka City’s downtown, and decidedly urban, Tsurumi Ward, where it was taken into custody on March 25 after being corralled onto the grounds of a police training facility, as shown in the video below.

This wasn’t the first recent deer sighting in Osaka Prefecture (of which Osaka City is a part). In the weeks leading up to the deer’s capture, deer had been seen in other eastern parts of the prefecture, with subsequent sightings becoming further and further west. But not only does Tsurumi Ward not have any wild deer, there are no known deer populations in the mountains that make up the prefecture’s eastern border, either.

On the other side of that border, though, is Nara Prefecture, which is famous for its herds of wild deer that are allowed to roam freely through Nara Park and its surrounding neighborhoods. So the most likely explanation for why a deer showed up on the streets of Osaka, Japan’s third-largest city, is that it wandered there from Nara, and since Nara Park’s deer are officially designated as living national monuments by the Japanese government, many people assumed that the captured deer would be shipped back to Nara so that it could return to the park.

However, the situation turned out to be more complex. When asked by the media about the prospect of transporting the deer back to Nara Park, Nara governor Makoto Yamashita said that the living national monument status only applies to Nara’s deer while they’re actually inside Nara Park. Once they step outside the park’s grounds, they’re to be treated like any other wild animal, and so Nara Prefecture, or at least its governor, was unenthusiastic about sending the deer back to its probable home.

At the same time, Osaka City doesn’t have a pre-determined protocol for dealing with captured deer, since the city doesn’t ordinarily have any wild deer. Thankfully, the deer captured in Osaka now has a new home, and also a new name: Shika-yan.

▼ Video of Shika-yan’s naming ceremony and new home. The Shika-yan name combines shika, the Japanese word for “deer,” and -yan, a sentence-ending emphasizer used in Osaka and the Kansai region, the name sound like a funny, friendly way of saying “It’s a deer!”

As of Match 27, Shika-yan has been living at Nose Onsen, a hot spring facility in the town of Nose in northern Osaka Prefecture. In addition to hot springs baths and a hotel, Nose Onsen also has a campground, and a part of it has been converted into a habitat for Shika-yan.

Last Friday, Nose Onsen’s owner, Osaka governor Hideyuki Yokoyama (who suggested the Shika-yan name), and Nara governor Makoto Yamashita attended a naming ceremony at the facility. Perhaps feeling a twinge of responsibility for his supposed former constituent, Yamashita brought presents for Shika-yan in the form of a wooden name plate and 200 shika senbei/deer crackers of the type sold by vendors in Nara Park for visitors to feed to the deer. Noting how Shika-yan sauntered over in a visibly familiar manner when the governors offered the snacks, Yokoyama bluntly declared “This deer is from Nara,” to which Yamashita replied “That is definitely a possibility.”

▼ Video of Shika-yan from the Nose Onsen official Instagram account

Even if it could be conclusively proven that Shika-yan originally came from Nara Park, returning the animal there probably wouldn’t be the best move. Nara Park’s deer population has reached record-high levels, which experts say is causing some of them to leave the park in an attempt to find territory of their own to claim. If that’s what happened with Shika-yan, shipping the deer back to Nara could just result in it leaving again, and it might not be so lucky as to avoid automobile traffic and the myriad other risks of traversing urban areas unaccustomed to wild animals suddenly appearing. “I hope Shika-yan will be loved by everyone forever,” Yokoyama said at the ceremony.

The plan is for any visitor to Nose Onsen, not just those booking overnight camping spaces, to be able to see Shika-yan, but as the finishing touches are still being put on the habitat and the animal is still in a transitionary stage, the new Osaka Prefecture resident’s public debut date is yet to be announced.

Related: Nose Onsen
Source: Yomiuri Shimbun, YouTube/FNNプライムオンライン
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