Inari

Inari is one of the most widely worshipped kami of Japan, the deity of rice, agriculture and, by extension, of prosperity, business and worldly success. Tens of thousands of Inari shrines stand across the country, more than for almost any other kami, their approaches marked by rows of vivid vermilion torii gates, of which the tunnels of gates ascending the hill at the head shrine, Fushimi Inari Taisha near Kyoto, are the most famous. Inari's most recognizable attendant is the fox (kitsune), the god's messenger, whose paired stone statues, often with a key or a jewel held in the mouth, flank Inari shrines, so that popular usage frequently blurs the messenger and the deity. Inari's most famous shrine, Fushimi Inari Taisha south of Kyoto, has a founding date recorded as 711 CE, when the powerful Hata clan, an immigrant lineage of Korean origin, established the kami on the slopes of Mount Inari.

The foundation legend holds that Hata no Irogu set up a rice cake as an archery target; the cake transformed into a white bird, flew to the mountain's peak, and rice grew where it landed, an origin story that ties the shrine directly to Inari's oldest identity as a grain deity before the later expansion into wealth and business.

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.