A Transdisciplinary Study Of Japan’s Blend Inari Belief

On one hand, Japan’s society has become highly modernized, urbanized, informationalized, highly-technologized and popularized; on the other hand, there still potentially exists the persistence to traditional culture. However, in fact, this "contradictory" existence exactly reflects Japanese nationality. Shrine has an inextricable relation with growth of rites, farming and festivals of Japanese common people. Folk beliefs, the representation of the public opinion, reflect like a mirror the ideology and culture of one country, one nation and one region.Inari belief, one of the most popular and common folk beliefs in Japan, whose believers can be found among the whole nation, has great influences on the daily life and value orientation of Japanese people until now. It originates from worship of nature and ancestry of primitive religion and integrates with other religions such as Shintoism and Buddhism in its process of development. Thus, it is an intermixed and composite belief. For one thing, the noumenon of Inari is fox, which originates from Yamagami and Kanda in agricultural society and integrates with Mascot of Buddhism, representing people’s best wishes for happiness and prayers for harvest. For another, integrated with essentially quirky fox and Dakini belief of Buddhist Shingon Tantric, Inari appears to have a double character, which is sometimes evil, incapable of distinguishing rightness from wrong, eager to revenge for hatred or the slightest misunderstanding between them, or is somewhat malignant and evil in religion. These can help readers have a glimpse of the spiritual world of the Japanese people.According to Japanese historical records, Inari is a minister of Wei State. The name of Inari stems from the legend of descendants of First Emperor of Qin worshiping their ancestry. Inari belief is affected by Chinese the theory of YIN and YANG and five elements and has close relations with Chinese folk belief of fairy fox. However, there are few systemic studies and researches on it, even translations and articles for propagating its knowledge hard to find. Researches on Inari belief have achieved great academic achievements in Japan, while different subjects are carried out of laying particular emphasis on their focuses and methods. Religious studies put an emphasis on analyzing characteristics of God and participation of religion by means of studying Buddhism and Shinto system. Historiography explores explicitly the basis of origin, process of spread and festival of worship though analyzing literature. Folklore aims to explain the relationships between Inari and real life, the physical forms of Inari in people’s mind via field study and varieties of cases. From the perspective of philology, this paper firstly gives an overall overview of representative writings concerning the study of Inari belief after World War Ⅱ in accordance with the difference of their schools and sequence of publishing time, and makes their logical successive relation clear by listing their major points. Secondly, this paper tries to break the boundaries among different schools and existing systems of contents, and selects main topics of common concern and generalizes into four major parts:origin, religious integration, noumenon and concretization of Inari belief and the relation between Inari belief and world of life. Then it briefly systemizes theories, methods, and results of Inari belief of researches of Post-World War II in Japan, which can hopefully provide some supplements, references and illumination to the understanding and researches on Japanese Inari belief to the domestic scholar.