Inari Ōkami (稲荷大神, いなりおおかみ) is the Japanese deity of rice, harvest, prosperity, and business success, and one of the most widely worshipped kami in the country. Foxes serve as Inari’s messengers, which is why fox statues guard Inari shrines. Some thirty thousand Inari shrines stand across Japan, headed by Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto.
The Deity Everyone Passes and Few Can Name
If you have spent a week in Japan you have already walked past Inari, probably several times a day. The small red gate wedged between two office buildings. The shrine on a department store roof. The pair of stone foxes with red bibs at the end of an alley in Osaka. That is Inari.
The name is written 稲荷, and the characters are agricultural: 稲 is the rice plant, 荷 is a load or burden carried. One common reading of the name is ine-nari, rice growing, or ine ni naru, becoming rice. Inari begins as the kami who makes the rice come.
That sounds narrow. It is not. In an economy where rice was food, wage, tax, and currency all at once, the kami of rice was the kami of wealth in general. As Japan urbanized, Inari simply followed the money. Rice became commerce, commerce became business, and the deity of the paddy field became the deity of the shop, the factory, the trading floor, and the start-up.
Where the Story Starts
Fushimi Inari Taisha dates its own founding precisely. The shrine records that the deity took up residence on the mountain on the first Day of the Horse of the second month of the year 711. That is why Hatsu-uma (初午), the first Day of the Horse in February, remains the biggest day in the Inari calendar, when Inari shrines nationwide fill with people praying for a good year in business.
The shrine’s own language for Inari is generous and slightly wonderful: the deity who provides food, clothing, and housing, the things that support life, and who brings abundance and joy.
Inari is not really one figure. Different shrines identify Inari with different classical kami, most often Uka-no-Mitama, a grain deity of the Kojiki. Inari has been depicted as an old man carrying sheaves of rice, as a young woman with grain, and as a bodhisattva-like figure, sometimes all at the same shrine. Ask three priests and you may get three answers. This is normal, and no one finds it a problem.
Inari is less a character than an appetite for life going well: the rice standing tall, the ledger balancing, the family fed.
The Foxes
The animal that makes Inari instantly recognizable is the fox.
Foxes are not Inari. They are tsukai, messengers and servants, and at the shrine they are called byakko, white foxes, invisible ones. Statues of them flank the approach and the inner gates in pairs, usually with something held in the mouth or under a paw. Learn the four and you can read any Inari shrine on sight:
- A rice sheaf. The harvest, the original gift.
- A key. For the rice granary, sometimes read as the key to the storehouse of blessings.
- A jewel. The hoju, the wish-fulfilling gem.
- A scroll. Wisdom, or the sutra.
The red bibs tied around their necks are offerings, the same kind people tie on roadside Jizo statues, a small act of dressing and caring for the figure.
The folklore around Japan’s fox spirits, the kitsune, grew up alongside all of this and eventually tangled with it. Shapeshifting foxes with up to nine tails are a folk tradition of their own, but their reputation as clever, uncanny, and closely connected to Inari comes from this shrine relationship. It is also why fried tofu, aburaage, is the classic offering. Foxes were said to love it, and the sushi rice parcels wrapped in sweet fried tofu are called inari-zushi for exactly that reason.
Why Businesses Pray to Inari
Walk up Mount Inari and you will notice something about the torii tunnels: every gate is inscribed. The back of each pillar carries a company name and a date.
Those gates are donations. A business that has had a good year, or that badly wants one, pays for a torii and has it erected on the mountain path. The larger the gate, the larger the sum, and the tunnel you are walking through is quite literally an accumulated record of Japanese commercial gratitude going back generations. Some of the gates date from the Edo period.
The habit runs deeper than the famous shrine. Japanese companies have kept private Inari shrines on their own property for centuries, and you will find them on the roofs and in the courtyards of banks, breweries, department stores, and printing houses. A new branch opens and a priest is called. The company that stops maintaining its shrine is thought, quietly, to be tempting fate.
If you want to bring some of that home, Inari shrines sell business-luck omamori amulets, and the ema racks at Fushimi Inari are full of little fox-face plaques with sales targets written on the back.
Visiting Inari
Fushimi Inari Taisha, Kyoto
This is the head shrine of the roughly thirty thousand Inari shrines in Japan, and one of the most photographed places on earth. It deserves both the fame and a better visit than most people give it.
Getting there. Take the JR Nara Line from Kyoto Station to Inari Station, the second stop, about five minutes. The shrine entrance is directly in front of you as you leave the station. Grounds are open at all hours, with no closing days and no admission charge.
Go at dawn. This is the single piece of advice that matters. By ten in the morning the Senbon Torii is a slow-moving queue with cameras. At six in the morning it is empty, misty, and silent except for crows. There is no gate to open and no ticket to buy, so nothing stops you.
The Senbon Torii. The name means “thousands of torii gates,” and it refers to the densest stretch, where the path splits into two parallel tunnels just behind the main hall. Take the right-hand tunnel going up. Roughly ten thousand torii stand on the mountain as a whole.
Decide how far you are going. Mount Inari is 233 meters high, and the full loop to the summit and back takes about two to three hours. Most visitors do not need to do the whole thing. The Yotsutsuji intersection, a thirty to forty-five minute climb, is where the trees open out into the best view over Kyoto, and it is a natural place to turn around. Above Yotsutsuji the crowds thin to almost nothing and the small altar clusters, the otsuka, get stranger and more moving.
Wear real shoes. It is a mountain path with stone steps, not a promenade. Take water in summer.
Toyokawa Inari, Aichi
The other great Inari site is not a Shinto shrine at all.
Toyokawa Inari, properly Myogonji, is a Soto Zen Buddhist temple founded in 1441 in the city of Toyokawa in eastern Aichi. It is dedicated to Toyokawa Dakinishinten, a Buddhist wish-granting deity usually shown riding a white fox, and it is one of the clearest surviving examples of how thoroughly Buddhist and Shinto worship of Inari braided together before the two were forcibly separated in the Meiji era.
The reason to go is Reikozuka, the fox mound: a hillside populated by around a thousand stone foxes in red bibs, each one dedicated by somebody whose wish came true. They stand in ranks, weathered to different degrees, every face slightly different. It is quieter, odder, and far less crowded than Fushimi.
It is less than an hour by train from Nagoya Station, and about a five-minute walk from JR Toyokawa Station or Meitetsu Toyokawainari Station. Merchants and business owners have come here for centuries for the same reason they climb Mount Inari.
Shrine manners
The usual sequence applies: a small bow before the first torii, keep to the side of the path rather than the center, purify your hands at the temizu basin, then coin, two bows, two claps, one bow. On the mountain, the small private altars are somebody’s personal devotion, not scenery. Photograph the path, not the offerings on them.
Check the shrine’s official website for festival dates and current hours before you travel.
FAQ
Who is Inari in Japanese religion?
Inari Ōkami (稲荷大神) is the kami of rice, agriculture, prosperity, industry, and business success. Inari began as a deity of the rice harvest and became, as Japan urbanized, the deity most associated with commercial good fortune. Roughly thirty thousand Inari shrines exist across Japan, headed by Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, which dates its founding to the year 711.
Is Inari male or female?
Both, and neither in any settled way. Inari has been depicted as an elderly man carrying rice sheaves, as a young woman with grain, and in androgynous or Buddhist forms, and different shrines identify Inari with different classical kami. The tradition never resolved this and does not treat it as needing resolution.
Why are there foxes at Inari shrines?
Foxes are Inari’s messengers, not Inari itself. Statues of them guard shrine approaches in pairs, usually holding a rice sheaf, a key, a jewel, or a scroll in the mouth. The association is old enough that fried tofu, said to be a fox favorite, became the standard offering, and gives inari-zushi its name.
Why are Inari shrines covered in red torii gates?
Each gate is a donation from a company or an individual, given in thanks for good business or in hope of it, with the donor’s name inscribed on the back of the pillar. At Fushimi Inari Taisha this practice has produced roughly ten thousand gates along the paths of Mount Inari, some dating back to the Edo period.
What is the best time to visit Fushimi Inari Taisha?
Early morning, ideally before seven. The grounds are open around the clock with no admission fee, and arriving at dawn gives you the Senbon Torii essentially to yourself. The full mountain loop takes two to three hours, though the Yotsutsuji viewpoint at thirty to forty-five minutes is a satisfying turnaround point.
What is Hatsu-uma?
Hatsu-uma (初午) is the first Day of the Horse in February, the anniversary of the day in 711 when Inari is said to have descended on the mountain at Fushimi. Inari shrines hold their major festival then, and worshippers offer fried tofu and pray for prosperity in the year ahead.
How is Inari related to other Japanese deities?
Inari sits alongside figures like Ebisu and Daikokuten in the popular economy of luck, and alongside Amaterasu and Susanoo in the classical myths, though Inari’s story is far less narrative than theirs. Our guide to Japanese gods and goddesses places fifteen of them side by side with the shrines where each is enshrined.