Last weekend, we enjoyed a family tourism day by visiting both the Fushimi Inari Shrine and the Tofukuji (Zen) Temple, both south of us on the Keihan train line. The Fushimi Inari Shrine is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it's the head shrine of the thousands of other Inari shrines in Japan. Inari shrines celebrate foxes, apparently because they are guardians of the rice harvest, and are often depicted with keys to the grainary in their mouths. Some sources suggest that foxes were historically overhunted, contributing to rodent overpopulation (who would eat the rice in the granaries), so one solution was to make them into kami and celebrate them at shrines.
The Fushimi Inari Shrine is more notable for its thousands (and thousands and thousands) of vermillion torii gates lining the paths up Mt. Inari leading to small sub-shrines. It was a peaceful and cool place to hike, even on a hot day, because of the constant shade of the gates.
After an iced coffee and ice cream interlude, we made our way back north via Tofukuji, a major Zen temple. Tofukuji is named after Todaiji and Kofukuji in Nara, temples it aimed to compete with as Kyoto became more central to Buddhism. We toured the main hall, reconstructred in the late 1800s with a garden designed in the 1930s by the famous landscape designer Mirei Shigemori.
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