The takeaway

Fushimi Inari Taisha is the head shrine of Inari, the kami of rice and, by extension, of prosperity and business. The gates – senbon torii, a thousand gates, though there are nearer ten thousand – are donations. A company or a family pays for one, their name and the date are lacquered onto the back, and the path up the mountain has been thickening this way since the 1600s. Walk up and you are reading a four-hundred-year business directory in black characters on vermilion.

The shrine is open twenty-four hours. There is no gate, no ticket and nobody on duty. That single fact is the whole opportunity: every other famous site in Kyoto opens at eight or nine and so the crowd arrives with it. Here you can simply turn up at six, and you will pass a handful of joggers and a few people praying and essentially nobody else.

Keep going for forty minutes – this is the bit I love. Almost everyone photographs the dense lower tunnels, walks ten minutes and turns back. Keep climbing to the Yotsutsuji intersection, about twenty-five to forty minutes up, where the trees open and the whole of southern Kyoto lies below you. From there a loop around the summit takes another hour and you will have it to yourself.

Practicalities. Five minutes from Kyoto Station on the JR Nara line to Inari, and the station is directly opposite the entrance. Wear shoes you can climb stone steps in. Take water – there are vending machines part way up, which is very Japan. And the fox statues everywhere are Inari’s messengers, usually with a key to the rice granary in their mouths.

A note on the photograph everyone wants. The empty-tunnel shot is only possible early, and even then you wait for gaps. Be patient, be quiet, stand to one side, and remember people are praying a few metres away – there are small shrines all the way up with offerings on them. It is a working shrine before it is a photograph.

Pair it with Tofuku-ji, two stops back towards the city, whose maple valley is the best autumn colour in Kyoto. You can do both and be having breakfast by half past nine.