New Year's Eve at Oji Inari Shrine: The Fox-Fire

North of Tokyo is Oji Inari Shrine. An Edo-period legend says that every New Year's Eve, foxes from the eight provinces of the Kanto region gather under a great hackberry tree beside the shrine, don formal robes, straighten their clothes and caps, and form a long line. Each carries one lantern, and together they go to the shrine to pay their New Year's respects.

Farmers nearby stand at a distance on that night to watch the line of lights. Many lights mean a good harvest in the coming year; few lights mean a poor one. The lights they see are called "fox-fire," glowing one by one in the darkness, stretching from beneath the tree all the way to the shrine gate.

In 1857, Utagawa Hiroshige depicted this scene in One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, titled "Fox-Fire on New Year's Eve at Oji's Hackberry Tree": a great tree, a group of foxes beneath it with small flames rising from their heads, and fields and woods in the distance. The print later became the image most often brought out whenever Japanese people speak of foxes.

There is also a rakugo story from the Edo period about Oji's foxes: a man tries to trick a fox, only to be fooled by a woman the fox has transformed into, and ends up treating her to a meal before realizing he's been duped. Rakugo endings are generally both funny and slightly open-ended.

Every New Year's Eve today, Oji still holds a "Fox-Fire Parade," running since the 1990s to the present: people paint fox faces on their faces, wear fox masks, carry lanterns, and walk from the old site of the hackberry tree to the shrine, while local residents watch from the roadside. There are many photos online.

The hackberry tree is long gone. On its old site now stands a small "Costume Inari Shrine," with a stone monument inside and a newly planted tree beside it. On every New Year's Eve night, no fox can be seen in the sky, yet people by the roadside count the lanterns, tallying how many lights there are this year.

#Folklore #网络转载 #日本怪谈