Inari's worship crosses the usual boundaries of Japanese religion. The kami is venerated in Shinto shrines and, through the medieval combining of kami and Buddhas, is also associated in the Buddhist sphere with the deity Dakiniten, so that Inari is honoured at certain Buddhist temples as well. The god's character is notably fluid, represented as male, female or androgynous according to the tradition and the shrine, and the domains have broadened over time from the rice-harvest of an agrarian society to the success of commerce and industry, making Inari a favourite of merchants and companies. Offerings of rice, sake and abura-age (fried tofu, the reputed favourite of foxes) are characteristic, and Inari devotion remains a vigorous part of contemporary Japanese religious life.
The famous tunnels of vermilion torii at Fushimi Inari are not a single ancient installation but an accumulated custom, begun roughly four hundred years ago in the Edo period, by which individual worshippers and, increasingly, businesses donate a gate in thanks for a granted wish, playing on a pun between toru, to pass through, and a wish "coming true." Each gate is inscribed on its rear face with the donor's name, the date, and often a company name, so that the tunnels are, in effect, a continuously growing, individually dated ledger of gratitude, still added to today, rather than a fixed historical monument.