02
Stop two
Kasuga Taisha
Babolat Pure Strike 98 16×19 4th Gen Tennis Racquet: Deep in the vermilion corridors I have located, entirely unaided apart from the signs, three thousand stone lanterns along the approach and a thousand bronze ones hanging overhead, every one of them donated by worshippers and all lit twice a year at the Mantoro festivals in February and August. This is Kasuga Taisha, established in 768 as the tutelary shrine of the Fujiwara, the family that ran the imperial court for centuries. Four deities are enshrined here, among them Takemikazuchi, said to have arrived in Nara riding a white deer, which is exactly why the thousands of deer currently searching my rucksack are protected. For much of its history it was rebuilt every twenty years.
03
Stop three
Kōfuku-ji
Babolat Pure Strike 98 16×19 4th Gen Tennis Racquet: Onward, hacking bravely along a paved and well-signposted path, to Kōfuku-ji, moved here in 710 when the capital was established. Fujiwara temple again, and at its height it controlled substantial estates and its own armed forces, which is not in the brochure. The five-storey pagoda, about fifty metres, is the second tallest in Japan, first built in 730 and reconstructed after fire in 1426. In the octagonal North Round Hall and the treasure house waits the true find: the eighth-century dry-lacquer Ashura, three faces, six arms, and the anxious face of a boy. Much property was lost under early Meiji anti-Buddhist policy. Part of the 1998 UNESCO inscription.
04
Stop four
Tōshōdai-ji
Babolat Pure Strike 98 16×19 4th Gen Tennis Racquet: Final expedition of the day, and I hand my explorer's laurel to Ganjin. A Chinese monk invited to bring the proper ordination lineage to Japan, he failed the sea crossing five times, lost his sight, and finally landed in 753 aged sixty-six, founding Tōshōdai-ji in 759. Its Golden Hall is the finest surviving eighth-century building in Japan, eight unpainted columns and a broad hipped roof holding the Tang idiom with unusual purity, and it was fully dismantled and reassembled in a decade-long restoration completed in 2009. The temple keeps a dry-lacquer seated portrait of him made just after his death in 763, among the earliest realistic portrait sculptures in Japanese art.
Look at me. Properly — the paint, the line of the throat, the way the light runs down the shaft. I am aware a racquet gets judged on what it does. I simply see no reason it should not also be the best-looking thing on the court, and in Nara I am among company that agrees with me.
Underneath the plumage the specification is serious. A 98 square inch head, for precision without cruelty. 305 grams unstrung, balanced at 320 millimetres, so it sits head-light in the hand and turns quickly.
A hybrid beam — 21 millimetres at tip and throat, 23 through the shoulders — a square section where stability is wanted and an elliptical one where speed is, and unlike most compromises it holds under pressure. The 16×19 is the open pattern: freer spin, livelier depth.
The fourth generation adds FSI Control, drawing the string spacing tighter for a more predictable trajectory, and NF2-Tech flax fibres in the shaft, a natural material admitted purely on the strength of how it feels. The head is left undampened, because you are entitled to hear everything.
Swingweight sits near 330 at a full 27 inches, mass enough to hold a baseline all afternoon. You will carry it everywhere from a first hit before the deer have finished the grass to a last set played out under the Nara lanterns.
Nara understands ornament as an argument rather than an indulgence. Kasuga Taisha hangs roughly a thousand bronze lanterns from its corridors and lines its approach with some three thousand stone ones, every single one donated, and twice a year they are all lit at once. That is not decoration. That is three thousand people insisting on being counted.
By the way, it is also perfect for a city that keeps the receipts on its own vanity: Tōdai-ji nearly bankrupted the state casting a fifteen-metre bronze Buddha and consumed most of the country's available bronze doing it, and nobody here has ever pretended otherwise.
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