Entrepreneurs in the city of Nagano in central Japan have taken advantage of widely available deerskins to launch a new shop selling a wide range of accessories.

Akari Nagasaki, who runs a restaurant in the city, began putting venison on his menus when the meat became available. His enquiries revealed that deer were causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage to agricultural crops in the area and that, throughout Japan, the ministry of agriculture had culled 600,000 deer in fiscal year 2019, with many of the carcases and all of the skins going to waste.

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