Fushimi Inari Shrine: what it is and how to visit it

It is a Shinto shrine, not a temple, and the distinction matters more in Japan than it does in English. Shinto shrines are marked by torii gates and house kami; Buddhist temples are marked by different gates and house images of the Buddha. Fushimi Inari is dedicated to Inari, the kami of rice — and therefore of the harvest, and therefore of prosperity, and therefore, in modern Japan, of business.

That chain of associations is the entire explanation for what you see when you walk in. Inari is the most widely worshipped kami in the country: roughly thirty thousand shrines are dedicated to this one deity, and this is the head shrine of all of them. Businesses come here to ask for a good year, and when the year is good they come back and pay for a gate.

The shrine was founded in 711 by the Hata, an immigrant clan of considerable wealth, and moved to the foot of this mountain in 816. The main hall you walk past was rebuilt in 1499, after the Onin War burned the earlier one. Everything above it — the tunnels, the thousands of small altars, the paths that fork and rejoin for four kilometres — accumulated afterwards, gate by gate, over centuries.

It is worth saying plainly that this is a working religious site rather than an attraction with a religious past. People are praying at the main hall while you photograph it. The shrine has never charged admission and shows no sign of starting.

Because every one of them was bought by somebody. A torii at Fushimi Inari is a thank-you: a company, a family or a shopkeeper whose year went well pays for a gate and has it raised on the mountain. The black characters painted down the right-hand leg are the donor’s name and the date it went up.

The prices are public and not small. A modest gate at the narrow end of the path starts around four hundred thousand yen; the large ones near the bottom, where everyone walks, run past a million. Wood rots in the Kyoto damp, so gates are replaced continuously — walk the mountain and you will pass raw cedar posts waiting to go up beside gates whose paint is flaking off.

The colour is not decorative either. Vermilion — shu — is held to ward off evil, and the pigment traditionally contained mercury, which happened to preserve the wood. A belief and a practical fact arriving at the same colour is very Japanese, and it is the single most repeated thing any guide will tell you here.