Fushimi Inari

In whichever direction I look, I seem to be surrounded by densely forested hills and mountains. I’ve been looking for a way to venture up into the hills since I arrived in Japan 3 months ago. I asked two different colleagues at work if there were walking paths into any of the nearby peaks, and they said that they didn’t know. Undeterred, I ordered the Lonely Planet’s Hiking in Japan guidebook. I figured that if there are local hikes, it must be possible to also run some of them as well, which would make for some interesting off-road long runs.

The first hike listed in the Kansai area is called Fushimi Inari. It starts at Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine, which is the most important of more than 30,000 such shrines in Japan that are dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice. There’s a cobbled street lined with shops, teahouses and food outlets just next to the shrine. A culinary speciality of the area is yakitori (grilled sparrow). Tradition holds that farmers considered sparrows a nuisance and would roast them as a warning to the ones still flying free. Sadly, there was no yakitori available when I paid a visit, so I had to settle for the nearest equivalent – grilled quail.

 

Fushimi Inari Taisha is best known for the more than 10,000 bright red torii (shrine gateways) in the forest behind the shrine.  It is possible, if you choose your route carefully through the maze of torii lined paths, to reach the summit of Inaria-san, from which you can view Kyoto City in the valley below. Most visitors only go as far as this, but it’s possible to drop off the summit into a valley to the north of the mountain. Following a stream through the forest leads you away from the torii and all the way to Tofuku-ji. This is the end point of the hike, which takes only a couple of hours. Tofuku-ji is one of the five great Zen temples of Kyoto, with three gardens that are worth seeing.

 

It’s not possible to do this hike as a run: the route is far too busy with tourists. So in this sense, the reconnaissance trip was a failure. Yet this day trip ranks as my best day in Japan so far. The walk is pleasantly relaxing, passing as it does through a beautiful forest covered mountain and is a chance to escape for a few hours from the hustle and bustle of Kyoto City. The torii lined path is an iconic image of Kyoto City, if not Japan. In any case, there are several other hikes in the Kansai area listed in the book that I intent to check out, some of which are in much more remote locations than Fushimi, and possibly even runnable.