Fushimi Inari-taisha

Fushimi Inari-taisha is best known for a single image: a path climbing a wooded hillside inside an unbroken tunnel of vermilion torii gates, glowing in the filtered light under the cedars. The gates — thousands of them along the mountain trails — are gifts. Businesses and individuals donate them in thanks or in hope, and each one carries the donor's name and the date inscribed on its back, so that the walk uphill reads the other way as a vast ledger of prayers for prosperity.

The shrine is the head sanctuary of Inari, the kami of rice and harvest who became the patron of commerce, and it presides over a network of roughly 30,000 Inari shrines across Japan. By tradition it was founded in 711 by the Hata clan, an influential immigrant family from the Korean peninsula, on the slopes of Inariyama, a 233-metre sacred mountain at the southern end of Kyoto's eastern hills. The main hall dates from 1499, and the great two-storey entrance gate is credited to Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Everywhere stand stone foxes, Inari's messengers, many holding a key to the rice granary in their jaws.

The Senbon Torii — "thousand gates" — are only the start. The paths climb on for about four kilometres, a climb of around two hours to the top, past clusters of small shrines stacked with miniature torii, stone altars, tea houses and quiet ponds. The crowds thin sharply with height, and in the upper reaches, especially early or late in the day, the vermilion corridors, moss and cedar take on the hushed, slightly uncanny atmosphere that makes this one of the great sacred landscapes of Japan.

Getting there

The shrine is in Fushimi ward, about 6 km south of central Kyoto, directly outside JR Inari Station on the Nara Line and a short walk from Fushimi-Inari Station on the Keihan Line. The nearest airport is Osaka Itami International Airport (ITM), about 37 km away.