Inari

← Encyclopedia

A small shrine stands in the corner of the rice-paddy, another at the head of the alley behind the fishmonger’s, a third on the roof of the department store among the air-conditioning plant, marked by a torii no taller than a child and a pair of foxes in stone with bibs of faded red tied at their throats. None of them is grand. Each is Inari’s. No kami of Japan keeps so many addresses, and none keeps them so close to the ground where people actually live and earn.

Inari is the kami of rice, and from rice the reach of the kami runs outward across the whole economy of getting and keeping — the harvest, then the wealth the harvest is, then the trade that moves the wealth, then the crafts that make goods to trade, down to the forge where the swordsmith works iron into a blade. A god of the grain becomes a god of prosperity, and a god of prosperity becomes the patron whom the merchant and the brewer and the company director petition by name. The vermilion gates that climb the mountain at Fushimi were each raised by someone whose prayer was answered, and there are thousands of them.

The founding on the mountain

The tradition fixes a date and a place. In the second year of the Wadō era, 711 of the common reckoning, the kami was enshrined on the mountain called Inari that rises southeast of the old capital, in what is now the Fushimi ward of Kyoto — a hill of modest height, some two hundred thirty meters, but a mountain in the sense that counts, a place where the kami had come to dwell. The enshrinement is credited to the Hata, an immigrant clan of weavers and cultivators and ironworkers who had settled the district and prospered there; legend names one Hata no Irogu as the founder of the rite. That a clan of newcomers skilled in craft and agriculture should have raised the first shrine to the kami of the grain and the forge is a fitness the cult has never lost.

What exactly was enshrined is harder to fix, and the tradition has never insisted on fixing it. The name Inari is read by the old grammarians as ine-nari, “rice that has come to be,” “rice-bearing” — the kami is the standing crop and the act of its ripening at once, not a person standing behind the crop so much as the crop’s own coming-to-be made present and addressable. When the learned have wanted a face for that presence they have reached into the older mytho-histories, the Kojiki of 712 and the Nihon Shoki of 720, and drawn out one or another of the grain-kami already named there: most often Uka-no-Mitama, the “spirit of the food,” but also Ukemochi, the food-goddess, and Toyouke, the kami of grain and sustenance worshipped at the outer precinct of the Ise Grand Shrine. The identifications are attributed, not settled, and they have shifted across the centuries. The kami of Fushimi was venerated long before anyone troubled to say which of the old names it answered to.

This fluidity is not a defect of the record but a property of the kami. Inari is now a goddess, an elegant woman bearing sheaves; now a god, an old man with a staff; now androgynous, now neither; and in many shrines a company rather than a single figure — three kami, or five, enshrined together on the mountain and addressed under the one name. The cult has kept all of these in play at once without troubling to choose, and a worshipper at one shrine and a worshipper at another may have quite different beings in mind while invoking the same kami. The grain feeds everyone; the giver wears whatever face the asker brings.

The contrast with the other great kami sharpens the point. The sun-kami of Ise has a settled identity, a fixed myth, an imperial genealogy that cannot be amended; the storm-kami Susanoo and the land-maker Ōkuninushi of Izumo move through long narrative careers in the old chronicles, with parents and quarrels and named deeds. Inari has almost none of this. There is scarcely a myth of Inari to tell — no birth-story in the Kojiki under that name, no cycle of adventures — because Inari is less a character in the divine drama than the divine aspect of a recurring fact, the swelling of the ear of rice in the field. The kami is defined by what it does for the living rather than by what it did in the age of the gods, and the doing is annual and reliable and everywhere.

A stone fox at the gate of an Inari shrine, the key to the rice-granary in its mouth. Photo: Geoffrey A. Landis, 2007. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The reach of the grain and the runner that serves it

The logic that carries Inari out of the field and into the city is the logic of rice itself. In the old order rice was not merely food; it was money, the medium in which taxes were levied and stipends paid and fortunes measured. To be the kami of rice was therefore already to be the kami of wealth, and the step from the granary to the counting-house was no step at all. By the late medieval centuries Inari had become the deity merchants turned to for good business, the brewers of sake and the makers of tea and the keepers of shops, and by the sixteenth century a patron of the swordsmith and through him a protector of warriors — the forge being another place where raw stuff is transformed into value, and the smith’s craft another harvest of a kind. The fox-shrine on the modern corporate roof, the offices of the trading house petitioning Inari at the new year, are the same cult unbroken: the kami of prosperity attends wherever prosperity is sought, which is to say nearly everywhere.

The creature at the gate is the fox, the kitsune, and the most common error about Inari is to take the fox for the kami — a confusion easy to fall into, since the foxes are the most visible thing at any Inari shrine and the kami itself shows no face at all. The tradition is firm that it is not the deity. The white foxes — byakko, the pure white foxes invisible to ordinary eyes — are Inari’s messengers and servants, the kami’s runners between the shrine and the world, and the stone pairs set flanking every Inari gate are images of these attendants, not of the deity they attend. The fox carries in its mouth, according to the shrine, one of a small set of emblems: a key, which opens the rice-granary; a round jewel, the wish-granting gem; a sheaf of rice; or a scroll. Scholars note that in the deep past the fox may itself have been revered as a rice-kami before the relation hardened into that of master and messenger — the fox of the autumn field, slipping among the cut stalks, an obvious familiar of the harvest. However the relation began, the cult as it stands keeps the distinction: the fox runs the kami’s errands and does not stand in the kami’s place.

Utagawa Hiroshige, “Fox-fires on New Year’s Eve at the Changing Tree, Ōji,” from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 1857 — the foxes assembling to pay homage at the eastern head-shrine of the Inari cult. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The gates and the head-shrine

At Fushimi the petitioner’s gratitude has built something without parallel. The custom, which took its present scale in the Edo period after 1603, is to dedicate a torii to the shrine in thanks for a prayer answered or in hope of one to come — and so many have given that the paths up the mountain run for kilometers beneath unbroken corridors of vermilion, gate behind gate behind gate, the donor’s name and the date inked in black down the post of each. This is the senbon torii, the “thousand gates,” though the true count runs to the order of ten thousand across the precinct, with some eight hundred crowding the famous tunneled stretch above the rear shrine. The red is the red of life and of warding, the color the whole cult has taken for its own; to walk up through it is to pass through the accumulated thanks of generations of small prayers, mostly about money and health and the success of a business, each one paid for in wood and pigment.

Higher on the mountain the worship grows more private and stranger. Among the cedars stand tens of thousands of small stone altars, the otsuka, each raised by an individual or a family to a particular aspect of Inari under a name of its own choosing — a personal kami split off from the great one, tended with candles and miniature torii and offerings of rice and fried tofu, the food the foxes are said to favor. The mountain holds, in effect, a vast informal pantheon of Inaris, every worshipper free to name and address a portion of the kami as their own. The head-shrine at the foot of it all, Fushimi Inari Taisha, presides over a network said to number some thirty-two thousand affiliated shrines — by the count of a 1985 survey, more than a third of all the Shinto shrines in Japan, which makes Inari, by sheer arithmetic of altars, the most widely worshipped kami in the land.

The senbon torii — the corridor of donated vermilion gates climbing Mount Inari at Fushimi. Photo: Zairon, 2016. CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons).

The Buddhist double

For the better part of a thousand years a Japanese worshipper drew no firm line between kami and buddha, and Inari sat at the center of one of the clearest of all the fusions. The institutional knot was tied early: in 823 the monk Kūkai, who had brought the esoteric teaching of Shingon from China, took Inari as the guardian kami of his great temple Tō-ji in the capital, binding the rice-kami of the neighboring mountain to the new Buddhism by ties of patronage and place. From that proximity grew a deeper identification. Inari’s feminine aspect came to be conflated with Dakiniten, an esoteric goddess descended from the Indian ḍākinī — a fierce flesh-eating spirit in her origin, tamed and exalted in the Japanese mikkyō into a wish-granting deity depicted riding upon a white fox, a sword in one hand and the flaming jewel in the other.

The convergence was almost inevitable once the fox was in the picture. Both figures rode or commanded the white fox; both granted what was asked; and the doctrine of the age, honji-suijaku, held that the native kami were the local traces and manifestations of the buddhas and bodhisattvas anyway — so the rice-kami of Fushimi and the fox-riding goddess of the mandala could be understood as one power seen from two sides. At certain temples the identification became the principal one: at Myōgon-ji in Aichi the deity is enshrined and worshipped to this day as Toyokawa Dakini Shinten, an Inari that is frankly and openly a Buddhist goddess, drawing pilgrims who come to a temple to pray to a kami. Dakiniten’s rite even brushed the throne: the esoteric tradition wove the goddess into the secret consecration surrounding an emperor’s accession, the power that grants worldly success enlisted at the summit of worldly power.

That long marriage of kami and buddha was broken by the state, not by the faith. With the Meiji restoration of 1868 the new government ordered shinbutsu bunri, the forced separation of kami from buddhas, and in the iconoclasm that followed, the haibutsu kishaku, Buddhist images and clergy were driven out of shrines that had housed them for centuries. Fushimi was reordered as a shrine of the kami alone, the Dakiniten association officially severed. But the older reality is not erased by the decree that ended it: the syncretic Inari, the fox-riding goddess and the rice-kami held as one, was the living form of the cult through the long medieval and early modern centuries, and at the surviving Buddhist Inaris it remains the living form still.

Offerings, small donated gates, and fox statues set among the otsuka altars at Fushimi Inari Taisha. Photo: Immanuelle, 2023. CC0 / public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The everyday kami

Inari did not pass into the modern world by way of grand theology or imperial ceremony, the routes that carried Amaterasu into the politics of the nation. The rice-kami stayed where it had always been, in the paddy and the shop and the household, and that is where it remains. The first days of the new year bring crowds to Fushimi and to the thirty-odd thousand lesser shrines to pray for prosperity in the year ahead; the festival of the first horse-day of the second month, the hatsuuma, marks the anniversary of the founding on the mountain. The offerings are rice and sake and the fried tofu called inarizushi, which bears the kami’s name because it is the foxes’ food. The petitions are as concrete as they ever were — a good harvest, a profitable year, a recovery from illness, a business that does not fail.

The face that asks is not philosophical and rarely doctrinal. It is the brewer hanging a fresh straw rope at the brewery shrine, the office worker tossing a coin at the corner torii on the way to the train, the family climbing the mountain on a spring afternoon to leave rice before a small stone altar tended by no one but themselves. Where the cults of the imperial line carry the weight of the nation’s history, and the mountain-kami draw the ascetic up the slope after a discipline of the body, Inari asks little and gives plainly. The shrine fits on a rooftop. The offering is a square of fried tofu. The prayer is for the year to go well, the harvest or its modern equivalent to come in. The kami of the grain became the kami of everything that grows out of grain — wealth, work, the prospering of a house — and so attends the ordinary getting of a living more closely than any other power in the Japanese world. The foxes keep their stone watch at every gate, the key to the granary in their mouths, runners for a kami whose great mountain of vermilion was raised, gate by single gate, out of nothing grander than gratitude for harvests brought in and prayers come true.

→ Related: Amaterasu · Susanoo · Okuninushi · Hachiman · Ise Grand Shrine · Izumo Taisha · Mount Miwa · Kumano Sanzan · The Yamato People · The Ainu · The Yamabushi · Shingon Japanese Esoteric Buddhism Mikkyo · Japanese Mountain Asceticism Sangaku Shinko · Itsukushima Shrine · Mount Fuji · Yamato · Buddhism · Tendai Tiantai Buddhism · Amitabha · Avalokitesvara · Soul