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An unexpected visitor stops by our cheap Japanese house in the countryside【SoraHouse】

Oona McGee Nov 5, 2023
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Proof that when night falls, nature comes out to play in the Japanese countryside, like something out of an anime film.

It’s been two years now since we bought a house in the Japanese countryside for the unbelievably low price of 1 million yen, or US$9,100, going by exchange rates at the time. Ever since, we’ve been tending to the old fixer-upper and in return it’s been revealing itself to us in a number of ways, introducing us city-slickers to a rural world that we now can’t imagine living without.

One of the first things we did after purchasing the property was set up a trail cam, and though we initially thought it might pick up paranormal activity during the midnight hours, it ended up picking up animal activity instead.

The animal that came to visit the SoraHouse in the dead of night turned out to be a raccoon, so we figured we didn’t have much to worry about in terms of wild fauna, but after a recent check of the trail cam, we were gobsmacked to find our latest visitor was…

▼ …a wild deer!

▼ This wasn’t just any deer — it was a male deer with incredibly large antlers.

We’d never seen a wild deer this beautiful before — even the free-roaming deer in Nara don’t sport these spiky appendages, as the antlers are cut in a traditional ceremony every October, to help ensure the safety of human visitors to the area — so to us it looked like something out of an anime film.

▼ Is this a deer or a deer god from the world of Princess Mononoke?

Interestingly, our unexpected visitor stopped a couple of times to look into the house, and we couldn’t help but think that if we were inside the front room at the time, the sight of it would’ve made us jump out of our skin.

▼ Although, on second thought, it was probably less interested in our home and more interested in its reflection on the glass.

It wasn’t just one night that the deer came to visit — as the photos above show, the animal stopped by at around three in the morning on 19 September, then two days later at 10:24 p.m., before last being spotted at 9:30 p.m. on 11 October.

The deer really took us by surprise, so now we know there are larger wild animals visiting us at night, we’re definitely investing in more trail cams. Hopefully they’ll help us spot more four-legged creatures at our property, because we much prefer these wild visitors than the mysterious two-legged ones.

Images © SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]