Kyoto :: Fushimi Inari Taisha

Right after the midterm (that still never happened) last Thursday, I took a JR highway bus from Kanazawa Station to Kyoto Station. The bus ride took around 4.5 hours, but it felt much shorter with the rest stops and the beautiful scenery. In case any of y'all want to know, the trip to Kyoto was 3300 yen (around 33 USD) and the return trip was a bit more expensive at 4100 yen (around 41 USD).

My friends and I stayed in a 1-room apartment up in Kita-ward that a friend booked on Airbnb for around 30 USD a night. It was a lot more comfortable than a hostel, and the host, Usasan, provided us with a huge brochure with info on sightseeing, buses, and biking trails (since the apartment we booked also came with two bikes!).

Fushimi Inari Taisha - 伏見稲荷大社

On Friday, we woke up bright and early (relatively bright and early) to go to the Fushimi Inari Taisha, which is famous for its Senbon Torii. Getting to the shrine was pretty easy. All we did was ride the JR Nara line form Kyoto Station for two stops to the Inari stop, and we were greeted immediately after exiting the station with a gigantic vermillion (which is apparently the bright orange-red color of the torii) torii where all the tourists stopped in huge groups to take pictures. This torii is called Romon and was donated in 1589 by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. 

Interesting-ish side note: We got there a bit earlier than the other people we were meeting up with, so we just people watched for around 10 minutes. Apparently tripods with cellphone holding attachments and long sticks with the same cellphone holding attachments are a thing now. Definitely a tool for upping the selfie game, but honestly, I feel like if people are going through that much trouble to lug around a gigantic stick or tripod, they wouldn't mind lugging around a camera that shoots in better quality than a smartphone. 

Why. Just why. (Pic scraped from hitcase.com)

Some history on Fushimi Inari Taisha. This Shinto shrine is the head shrine dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice. However, Inari is also seen as the patron of business, so usually businesses and merchants worship Inari by donating torii to the shrine. On the back of each of the torii at Fushimi Inari, you can see the name of the company or business that donated the torii and the date in which it was erected. The messenger of Inari were foxes, so there are several different fox statues all around the shrine and along the trail usually holding rice or keys in their mouths. 

Past the shrine, we walked through the Senbon Torii, two rows of thousand(s?) of densely packed torii that make it really feel like you're being transported into another world. Even with the hordes of other tourists walking up and down the pathway, it felt like if I looked quickly enough around a corner, I would see a kitsune (fox) running around carrying messages. 

Once again, I was a bit too engrossed in my surroundings (and too lazy) to take any photos, so I am resorting to stealing the photos of Thaddeus Lee. So...if the pictures from our blog posts about Kyoto look eerily similar, it's because I am shamelessly using his wonderfully taken photos to make up for my own laziness. 

Senbon Torii, PC Thaddeus Lee

Further along the trail, the torii became progressively less dense, as did the tourists. Along the way there were also a couple side trails that led to smaller shrines and gravestones for worship and praying. We took a while to explore the area, and in our wanderings we happened upon several cats lazing about sleeping on top of the gravestones and meandering through the forest. Adorable and just a little magical in an "woah I thought this only happened in anime/manga" kind of way. 

Definitely seems like the place to happen upon a god. Or a kitsune looking for a human to possess. PC Thaddeus Lee

I'm going to be a bit geeky here and say that the feeling I got from the shrine was quite reminiscent of a manga called Natsume Yuujinchou. Definitely a worthwhile manga/anime to check out if you are at all interested in Japanese folktales and spirits. 

This was one of the side grave/tiny shrine areas that branched off from the main trail. PC Thaddeus Lee

After around 30 minutes of walking, we reached the Yotsutsuji Intersection which was about halfway up the mountain. From there, we could see all the way out to Kyoto, and the view was quite beautiful. Looking out at the city and the surrounding mountains, I can really understand why the Japanese word for blue is the same word as green, as all around, the green mountains and forests were covered in a blue haze that made it seem like we were looking out towards the rest of the world through a blue veil. (Unfortunately I have no pictures of this for reasons explained above, but just imagine looking through a framing of green, green leaves and out into a city nestled into a valley surrounded on all sides by blue watercolor giants) At this point, we decided to turn around and go back so we still had time to explore more of Kyoto, but if we had continued all the way up the mountain and back around, it would have taken around 2-3 more hours.

I'm most certainly looking forward to going back to Fushimi Inari early on in the morning or around sunset when there hopefully aren't as many tourists and school groups around to screw with the surreal atmosphere of the shrine. 

Stay tuned for a couple more (hopefully not too many) posts about Kyoto and more picture stealing from my friends! Thanks for reading, and DFTBA