Inari (Inari Ōkami)

The path up Mount Inari climbs through a tunnel of vermilion. Thousands of torii gates stand shoulder to shoulder, each donated by a family or a business, their lacquer bright against the cedar dark, and the light that reaches the ground comes through them stained the color of watered blood. At the turns sit foxes carved in stone, lean and alert, a key or a round jewel clenched in their jaws. Coins rattle into wooden boxes. Somewhere below, the sweet-sour smell of fried tofu drifts from an offering left that morning. This is Fushimi Inari-taisha, the head of some thirty thousand shrines, and the god it serves is the most worshipped and least pinnable figure in Japan.

Inari is the kami of rice, and rice in Japan was never only food. It was wealth, tribute, the measure of a domain, the thing on which a year of labor lived or died. A god who governed the harvest governed everything downstream of it, and so Inari’s reach widened over the centuries until it covered fertility, trade, sake brewing, the forge, and plain worldly success. Farmers prayed for a full paddy. Merchants prayed for a full ledger. The god answered both, or was believed to, which in matters of faith comes to the same thing.

The name does not appear in the oldest chronicles. Inari steps into the record already grown, and the early tellers reached backward to explain the god by tying the figure to Uka no Mitama no Kami, the august spirit of food, a child of the storm god Susanoo. Other accounts fold in Uke Mochi or Toyouke, older deities of grain and sustenance. The most repeated origin is a founding tale set in the year 711, when a wealthy man of the Hata clan, an immigrant family from the mainland, grew careless with his plenty and used rice cakes for archery targets. One cake rose into the air as a white bird and flew to the peak of the mountain, and where it landed rice sprang up. The word for the growing of rice, ine nari, gave the god a name. The man built a shrine on the spot to beg forgiveness.

The foxes came with the god, or the god came with the foxes; the stories no longer trouble to separate them. These are not the ordinary animals of the fields but byakko, white foxes, invisible spirit servants that carry Inari’s will between the shrine and the world. White here means pure rather than colored. They hold in their mouths the things the god provides: a key to the rice granary, a jewel of granted wishes, a sheaf, a scroll. Because a pair of them guards every shrine gate, people began to honor the messenger for the master and to say that Inari simply was a fox. Priests of both Shinto and Buddhism have spent centuries correcting this, without much success.

The god wears no single face. In one image Inari is a white-bearded old man on a sack of rice, two foxes at his side. In another the god is a young woman with long loose hair and an armful of grain. In the Buddhist tradition the figure becomes Dakiniten, an androgynous bodhisattva riding a flying white fox through the clouds. Male, female, neither: the sources give all three and rarely agree on which. The god has no fixed body, and never needed one.

When the Shingon monk Kūkai took charge of the great temple of Tōji in the ninth century, he claimed Inari as its protector, and the kami passed easily between the two religions that shared the islands. By the medieval period Inari had also become the patron of the men who made swords. The Noh play Kokaji preserves the most famous scene of this bond. The smith Sanjō Munechika, ordered by the emperor to forge a blade, has no partner fit to strike opposite him at the anvil. He goes to the Inari shrine and prays. A boy appears, then reveals himself as the fox spirit of the mountain, and together they hammer out the sword called Ko-Gitsune-maru, Little Fox. The work finished, the spirit mounts a cloud and rides back to the peak.

The devotion is not only a matter of grand legend. In a back alley behind an office tower, a clerk sets a parcel of fried bean curd on the ledge of a shrine no bigger than a birdhouse, claps twice, and returns to work. Aburaage, the foxes’ favored food, still wraps the rice of inari-zushi and carries the god’s name to lunch tables across the country. The exchange is small, daily, and entirely serious.

What Inari grants is abundance in its many shapes: grain that fills the store, children that fill the house, coin that fills the purse, protection for the soldier and skill for the smith. The white foxes extend the god’s hand into a thousand places at once, guarding those who keep the shrine and marking those who do not. Yet the bargain runs both ways, and there lies the god’s limit as much as its power. Inari’s favor is given for devotion and withdrawn from those who forget it. Folk belief holds that a slighted Inari, or a fox slipped loose from its discipline, can turn on a household, and tales of fox possession, kitsune-tsuki, gather at the edges of the cult like weather. The god that fills the granary can empty it just as quietly. For all the shrines and all the offerings, Inari stays the deity hardest to hold still, worshipped everywhere and fully known nowhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Inari?

Inari is the Japanese Shinto kami of rice, fertility, prosperity, and worldly success, and one of the most widely worshipped deities in Japan. Inari is served by white fox messengers and honored at roughly thirty thousand shrines, the head shrine being Fushimi Inari-taisha in Kyoto.

What is Inari the god of?

Inari governs rice and the harvest above all, and from that root the god’s domain grew to include agriculture, fertility, sake brewing, trade, industry, swordsmithing, and general prosperity. Farmers, merchants, brewers, and warriors have all claimed Inari as a patron.

Why is Inari associated with foxes?

Foxes, called kitsune, are Inari’s sacred messengers, depicted as pure white spirit foxes that carry the god’s will and often hold a key, jewel, or rice sheaf in their mouths. Because a pair of fox statues guards the gate of every Inari shrine, many people came to identify the god directly with foxes, a belief that Shinto and Buddhist priests both discourage.

Is Inari male or female?

Inari has no fixed gender and appears as male, female, or androgynous depending on the tradition and the era. Common depictions include a bearded old man carrying rice, a young woman bearing grain, and the Buddhist figure Dakiniten riding a white fox.

What is Fushimi Inari-taisha?

Fushimi Inari-taisha is the head shrine of the Inari cult, located on Mount Inari in Kyoto and traditionally founded in 711 by the Hata clan. It is famous for its winding paths lined with thousands of vermilion torii gates, each donated by a worshipper or business seeking the god’s favor.

Related Entries

Kitsune, Susanoo, Amaterasu, Dakini, Raijin, Tengu, Tanuki, Inugami, Yama-uba, Kumiho