The corridors of vermilion torii at Fushimi Inari are the most photographed religious image in Japan, and almost nobody who photographs them reads what is written on them.
What the torii are
There are roughly ten thousand on the mountain, with about eight hundred packed into the dense stretch called the Senbon Torii, and the paths run some four kilometres.
Every one of them was paid for by a donor.
On the back of each upright is carved the donor's name and the date of the donation. The donors are overwhelmingly businesses, companies large and small, from national corporations to a single restaurant.
So the tunnel that stands for Japanese spirituality in the global imagination is, read from the other side, a standing ledger of corporate votive offerings, arranged chronologically as they were erected. Prices scale with the size of the gate, from a few hundred thousand yen to over a million.
They are also impermanent. Cedar rots, and torii are replaced continuously, which is why the vermilion is always fresh and why the ledger keeps turning over.
Why businesses
Inari is the kami of rice, and by a straightforward extension of what rice meant, of prosperity, commerce and business success.
Rice was wealth, it was tax, salary and currency. A kami who ensured the rice harvest was a kami who ensured wealth, and as the Japanese economy shifted from agriculture to commerce and then to industry, Inari's constituency shifted with it without any change of doctrine being required.
Inari worship spread very widely: something like thirty thousand subordinate shrines across Japan, more than for any other kami, plus countless small shrines on the roofs and in the yards of businesses.
The foxes
Stone foxes sit throughout, often with a key, a jewel, a scroll or a sheaf of rice in the mouth. They are messengers, not the kami itself, a distinction the shrine maintains and popular usage frequently collapses.
Founded by immigrants
The shrine was formally founded in 711 by the Hata, an immigrant lineage from the Korean peninsula who had settled in the Kyoto basin and were prominent in sericulture, weaving and engineering.
That is worth stating plainly, because Shinto is often presented as indigenous by definition, the native religion of Japan, set against imported Buddhism. Its most-visited shrine was established by settlers from the continent, and the Hata were involved in the founding of other major Kyoto institutions besides.
Access
The shrine is open at all hours and charges nothing. The New Year draws millions over the first three days, consistently among the highest figures for any shrine in western Japan.