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The founding myth is precise. In 768 CE, the deity Takemikazuchi-no-mikoto is said to have traveled from Kashima Shrine in Ibaraki Prefecture to the new capital at Nara on the back of a white deer. The journey was understood as the deity choosing Nara as his new residence, and Kasuga Taisha was founded that year to house him. From the moment of founding, the sika deer of Mount Kasuga were treated as physical messengers of the kami — not symbolic representations, but actual divine beings in deer form. The Fujiwara clan, which ruled Heian-period Japan as imperial regents and ranked at the very top of court hierarchy, would dismount from their carriages upon encountering a sacred deer. The gesture is significant: the Fujiwara possessed essentially absolute political power, and yet the deer outranked them at the religious level. The Shikayose deer-calling ceremony, in which musicians summon deer from the surrounding forest with horn music, has been documented at Kasuga Taisha for centuries. The ceremony is still performed today, with the deer responding by emerging from Kasugayama primeval forest in numbers that have not noticeably changed across the documented period.

Sika deer enter Japanese literature in the 8th-century Man'yōshū, the country's oldest poetry anthology, where they appear as figures of autumn, yearning, and sacred presence. The bellow of a male sika deer in autumn — a sound somewhere between a moan and a cry — became one of the most-cited images in classical waka poetry, representing both the season and the loneliness of distance from the beloved. For the entire Edo period (1603–1868), killing a sacred Nara deer was punishable by death. Records of the punishment being applied are sparse, suggesting either that the law was a strong enough deterrent that few attempted the act, or that local enforcement was severe enough to leave no record. Either way, the result was 1,200 years of unbroken religious protection. Kasugayama, the mountain behind the shrine, has had logging forbidden for over a thousand years on the same Shinto-led conservation principle. The result is one of the oldest preserved sacred forests in Japan and now a UNESCO World Heritage component. The deer's protected status and the forest's protected status together created a self-contained ecological refuge, which became the basis for the genetic findings noted in 2023.

Roughly 1,300 sika deer still walk freely through Nara Park, a downtown public space that doubles as the shrine's outer grounds. They cross intersections, accept crackers from tourists (the official deer crackers are made specifically for this purpose), and have learned to bow politely in exchange for food — a behavior that emerged organically and is now culturally famous. They cause traffic to yield. They occupy benches. Under modern Japanese law, the Nara deer are National Natural Treasures, continuing the twelve-century-old religious arrangement in statutory form. Hitting one with a car remains a serious legal matter; killing one accidentally requires reporting and produces a small but real legal proceeding. The deer have also become one of Japan's most photographed cultural subjects, appearing in tourism campaigns, manga, and the global Instagram aesthetic of "travel to Japan." The relationship is asymmetric: the deer are objectively wild animals to whom thousands of unfamiliar humans approach daily, and they have adjusted to this with the same composure that the Fujiwara nobles once adjusted to them.

The sika deer's role is the result of one decision in 768 CE compounded across 1,300 years. Most sacred animal designations in world religions are symbolic; the actual animals continue their ordinary biological lives elsewhere. The Nara deer are different — the religious decision physically reshaped the population, producing an actual sub-group of deer that exist because of, and only because of, their sacred designation. The gentle, unfrightened temperament that strikes every visitor is itself the artifact. Sika deer in other parts of Japan are wary of humans in the way wild deer normally are. The Nara deer are calm because they grew up in a population where humans never threatened them. Twelve centuries of religious protection produced a behavioral phenotype that is now indistinguishable from the cultural meaning the deer was first assigned.