Fushimi-Inari-Taisha

Day one in Kyoto dawned bright, clear and crisp.  Surprisingly, while it was definitely colder than Oki, it wasn’t the bone-chilling sort of cold that I expected/feared.  Humid cold vs. dry cold and all that.  Wanting to knock out the biggest must-do’s first in case the weather or child-related factors made things difficult later on, we started off with some pretty impressive, once-in-a-lifetime sights.

First up: Fushimi-Inari-Taisha, a Shinto shrine complex located on Inari-san (Mt. Inari).  Fushimi-Inari was dedicated to the gods of rice and sake in the 8th century, but now is devoted to ensuring prosperity in business and industry.  It is the head shrine of some 40,000 Inari shrines scattered throughout Japan.

The stone fox is a well-known symbol of the shrine; there are dozens of them around the site.  The fox holds the key to the rice granary in its mouth and is considered to be the messenger of the god.

Fushimi-Inari is a very popular place to make your hatsu-mode, first shrine visit of the new year.  Luckily we arrived about a week after most of that was over with and therefore missed the crowds.

New Year’s decoration in front of the monastery.

Getting your fortune for the New Year is very important.
  Pull the ribbon to ring the bell and get the god’s attention.  (Anyone else thinking about Elijah and the prophets of Baal?)

 A monk rushes out to begin a service.

This rather amused me.  There was a smaller shrine containing what looked a lot like a carousel horse and someone had left it some carrots. 

But the real attraction here (for the tourists), is the torii gate trail behind the shrine.  Thousands of torii gates form a 4 kilometer tunnel through the forest.  We weren’t able to walk the whole thing as Logan was getting rather hungry and antsy, but it was distinctly impressive.

   Next up: the tallest pagoda in Japan.