There is a great deal of personalization of the kami in the worship of Inari. On Inari Mountain in Fushimi, for example, Inari is worshipped under tens of thousands of names, a phenomenon seen in contemporary Buddhist forms of Inari worship as well. This article describes various aspects of this personalization, sketches its historical background, and gives examples of how devotees understand their "own " Inari. It also explores the relation between cultural understandings of the fox in Japan and expressions of individuality within Inari worship, suggesting that the fox is, among other things, a powerful metaphor for the distinct, yet pri vate, individuality that balances social personae in Japan.
This article provides an example of contemporary pilgrimage practices in Ja p a n by focusing on the In a ri pilgrimage on In a ri M ou n tain in
giving the pilgrims an opportunity to express their own personal ized In a r i beliefs. The in d iv id u a liz a tio n modeled by these In a r i pilgrimages calls into question generalizations regarding the sense of "communitas" that is often identified with the liminality of the pilgrimage.U nlike historical pilgrimage routes that in some way connect to the life and death o f the founder of the religion (Turner and Turner 1978,p. 33), or those that transport the pilgrim "by the mimesis of symbolic action" through the realms of existence and states of spiritual death and rebirth (Blacker 1975, p. 208), the pilgrimage that centers on Inari Mountain 稲荷山 in Fushimi 伏見, Kyoto, has neither an his torical nor a symbolic narrative that gives it shape.1 It takes shape dif ferently for each pilerim, depending on the particular route followed through the dense mountain of symbols. It may be that there was in the past one or more coherent narrative, which has eroded over time from a rich rite of spiritual passage to a test of physical stamina in which the doine is emphasized more than the meaning.2 Or, it may be that there never was a prescribed format, and the pilgrimage tradition developed in similar fashion to that of the rock altar tradition一 1 This article is based on fieldwork conducted from September 1980 to June 1991.A See B l a c k e r 's description of this process in the Shugendo mountain pilgrimages of O m ine and Haguro (1975, pp. 217-18, 233-34).
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