10,000 Toriis at Night

After dinner, the four oldest kids and I decided to go check out Fushimi Inari Shrine.  This famous Shinto shrine is dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice.

Instead of the usual demon-like characters, a pair of warriors stood guard over the grounds.

This was the first shrine that we have visited at night....

...no one was here and the buildings were all locked up for the night.  There were many lanterns lit, however, so we could easily see where we were going.  The quiet night and beautiful lanterns made you feel the need to whisper.

Behind the shrine buildings stands Mount Inari.  This mountain contains a trail where one can climb to the top and back down in one long loop.  The trail is straddled by thousands of red torii gates.  The information on this site claims that there are 10,000 red toriis on the mountain.  Businesses and individuals will give money to the temple to have a torii on the mountain.  Their torii will contain their name and the date of their donation.

Hiking the loop is something we were really excited to do!  However, in researching the advice of others before us, we knew that the hike during the day is frustrating.  There are a lot of people and the entire loop takes 2-4 hours on average. It was suggested to do the loop at night--less people and it would take only 1-2 hours. 

 Besides, there is something mysterious and peaceful in doing the hike at night. 

We were greeted by a lot of cats along the way. 

There were many little shrines along the trail...a lot of them, in fact!



We wondered if maybe some of these shrines were family shrines??

On many of these little shrines there were several of these small red toriis.

We got here a little after 9 p.m.  There were many side trails and shrines that we explored, but we were still able to barely make the last metro that would take us home at 11 p.m.  Barely.
(When we got to the train station, we were running down the concrete stairs to make the train, and Logan lost his balance and fell down about 7-8 stairs.  He hit his head pretty hard, but had his coat hood on and was also wearing the backpack.  I think the backpack protected his back from injury.  He was hurting, but his first concern was the ipad in the backpack and whether or not it was broken.  He had a headache for a couple of days because of his fall.  We wondered if he had a mild concussion.  Logan is a trooper, though, and didn't let his headache ruin his trip.  I am so glad that it wasn't worse than it was, he could have really been hurt!) 

When we were about 3/4 through, Chris asked me what count I had on the number of toriis that we had passed through.  I told him that I didn't know, and asked him if he had been counting.  He hadn't counted either, so I guess we will never know if there are REALLY 10,000 red toriis on Mount Inari.

The view from the top!

 Heading back down the mountain....many stairs up, many stairs down.  The only other people that were up here were a few exercisers.  The many stairs make it a great place to exercise.  We did also see one other gentleman in a business suit.  Other than that, we only had to share the place with the cats.

It was really fun to do this trail at night!  The kids thought it was a blast!  A couple of nights later, Dad did the trail with Chris, Logan, Tayla, and Nathan.  (Caitlin volunteered to come home with me to help me with the two babies.)  We were worried about Nathan being able to do it, but he loved it so much he kept up just fine.  On our last night in Kyoto, Raymond and I did the trail together, leaving the kids at home sleeping.  This arrangement made it so that we all were able to do it--most of us twice--and we didn't need to haul Audra and Kirstin around.  The stroller wouldn't have worked, and carrying the two littles on this trail would have been sooo hard!

Walking up and down a mountain through thousands of red toriis at night is one of our favorite activities of our time in Kyoto!