Kitsune and Inari

Foxes in Japanese religion and folklore. Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto reveres them as the unseen messengers of Inari Okami, while folk tales tell of fox wives, and of foxes said to haunt houses or to be kept by families.

Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto says in its FAQ that foxes are the messengers, or kindreds, of Inari Okami. These messengers differ from wild foxes on the hills. Like Inari Okami, they are invisible, and so the shrine calls them byakkosan, white foxes. The shrine's history page cites an ancient shrine text. In 711, on an order from Empress Genmei, Irogu no Hatanokimi, a man of standing in the area of Kyoto now called Fukakusa, enshrined three deities on three mountains, and that year farmers had rich harvests of grain and silk.

The Encyclopedia of Shinto, from Kokugakuin University, explains how foxes and Inari became linked. The names of three kami tied to Inari contain sounds that mean food, and one name, miketsukami, sounded the same as a written name meaning three fox kami. In effect, it says, this brought fox kami into being. People also believed foxes could deliver oracles or haunt houses, which gave rise to fox handlers who worked as shamans (kitsune tsukai), female mediums and specialists in protective prayer.

English Wikipedia says the earliest fox-wife story, in which a man's wife is revealed as a fox after the household dog frightens her, is in the Nihon Ryōiki, a collection of Buddhist tales compiled around 822. Yanagita Kunio's Tōno Monogatari (1910), tale 21, describes a village scholar who wanted to befriend foxes and make his house rich. He built an Inari shrine in his garden, went to Kyoto to obtain a rank for it, and left fried tofu there every day until the foxes were tame enough to let him hold them by the neck. The keeper of the village's Yakushi hall often joked that his own Buddha got no offerings at all and still did more good.

The fox belief also did harm. Lafcadio Hearn wrote in 1894 that in Izumo, families believed to keep foxes, called kitsune-mochi, were shunned. No one would marry into them, and their daughters had to marry into another such family or find a husband far outside the province.