A Thousand Torii Gates - Fushimi Inari Shrine, Japan

Fushimi Inari Shrine is a popular tourist destination in Japan that gets extremely crowded during the day. But if you can get there early enough - it’s absolutely worth the visit and a completely different experience.

It’s super easy to get to Fushimi Inari Shrine as it’s right in front of JR Inari Station, and only 5 minutes by train from Kyoto Station. We caught the earliest train in and I’m so glad we did. It was almost completely empty, we encountered maybe 3 people, and it was so peaceful walking through the torii gates at our own pace. I definitely recommend getting here as early as you can, at least before 10am, otherwise it’ll get pretty crowded. But I heard that some great food stalls set up on the shrine grounds around 10am, so you could also time your descent to avoid the crowds and make it down in time for the food?

Fushimi Inari Shrine is dedicated to Inari - the Shinto god of rice - and because foxes are thought to be Inari’s messengers, you may see some fox statues at the shrine grounds. The entrance of the torii gates are hard to miss and are located at the back of the shrine grounds. If you’re curious as to where the gates came from: each gate was donated by either a company or individual (a large one is ~AUD $13,000!) and the inscriptions on each gate are the donator’s name and the date of the donation.

Senbon Torii - entrance to the trail

We spotted a few stray cats

While a lot of wildly popular tourist destinations can lose their magic, I think that the torii gates trail at Fushimi Inari Shrine are really worth the visit if you can avoid the crowds. You’ll be surrounded by the beautiful forest as you walk up Mount Inari (it can get a little steep but it’s not a difficult trail) and you’ll catch glimpses of sunlight shining through the trees and lighting up the torii gates along the way. It was a really peaceful and unique experience.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get further than the view at checkpoint 6 because I was way too hungry, and it would’ve added an extra 40 minutes to do the summit loop, so we headed back down after this. We must’ve taken a wrong turn though because we ended up on a completely different path (which was residential) to the one we started on.

But that’s okay, because we’ll be back someday to reach the summit of Mount Inari… with snacks.

Jess x

Find me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter + Bloglovin'.