I have an interesting relationship with the Shrines around Mount Inari because of how I foolishly experienced them. The mountain is located a few stops south of Kyoto Station by a
station dedicated to the mountain.
Overall, Inari Station is an unremarkable station around a typical look Kyoto neighborhood. However, after a few minutes of walking, there is a grand entrance to Inari Shrine seemingly out of nowhere.
The pavement guiding you down the long walk towards the shrine is neatly
paved and colored a light grey. Before you reach the place to pray, there is a fork in the road between steps and a curve road that slopes upward lined with food and souvenir shops.
Like the other Shinto shrines in Japan, passed the Torii gate and under the main sanctuary, people ceremoniously toss coins into wooden boxes. This shrine is to a God of foxes, rice, and prosperity.
It is behind the Shrine that makes the area famous though. At the foot of a small mountain, there is a walkway with more Torii Gates than you’ll ever imagine seeing, painted in the sharp red that brightens the thicket up the mountain and consumes your senses when you walk through it.
Atop this small mountain is another shrine, Yashiro Shrine. The walk up to the top usually takes three hours and is considered to be of medium difficulty. My belief that it was more of a hill than a humble mountain was what encased what should have been this simple climb into my memory.
I had been living in Japan about six months and my friend had come to visit me. He had visited Japan twice before but had spent all his time in Tokyo, so this time we planned to go to Kyoto.
We arrived in the city hours before our check-in and decided to go to Mount Inari first still carrying our bags and wearing our coats too heavy for the temperature change that is common area a ride on Japan’s bullet-train.
My friend was enamored with the Torii gates, and I decided that meant it was worth risking a hike up with all of our belongings. What happened then was we turned a hike that children and the elderly were capable of doing into one that left us sweaty and defeated by the time we got to the top, needing to trade bags often since, to add a little more, I had given him a pile of books I had read to bring back to the United States for me.
So now, what I know must be a serine simple hike with charming gates and altars up the old steps carved into the mountain lives in my mind as difficult. Granted, if anything it gives to reason to do it again, properly. In order to see how much unnecessary exhaustion I gave my already jetlagged friend.
