Introduction
    If only this book had been published twenty years ago. I wish I had read it before I began---in the name of ethnographic truth-seeking---to pester fishers and shellfish divers who live on the coast of the Shima Peninsula to explain their lives and livelihoods to me. A few exploratory walks around the neighborhood made me aware of the many little Inari shrines that dapple the landscape. No surprise: I had noticed Inari shrines for years, everywhere I lived or visited in Japan. Dr. Smyers notes that Inari "has the greatest number of shrines of any Shinto deity and is one of the most widespread forms of traditional worship in Japan." (page 216) And that has been a problem. Foxy old Inari-san has hidden herself in plain view. Like most students of Japanese life I have been looking at her but not really seeing her.

    Not that I completely ignored her on my sojourns in Shima. It soon became evident that Inari worship is built into the daily maritime work routine. Early in the morning many of the divers and boatmen stop off at an Inari hokora, or at more than one, before they go down to the beach. It’s one of several ways that they solicit sacred help on their continuing quest for safety at sea and for huge catches. (The most common greeting heard along the beach is dairyoo kai? ---"Got a big catch?") From time to time I asked them about such practices. Or I took photos, or in later years videoclips, of people’s brief encounters with Inari-san at the shrines: you can see samples of these videoclips in my 1993 documentary program Fit Surroundings.

    Okay, I was noticing; but I was not probing. Or in current lingo, I was not problematizing. This despite recursive prodding from my field partner, whose research among hill peoples in northern Thailand sensitized her to manifestations of animism. Strolling around the great shrines of Ise---which figure importantly in Shima lives---she remarked that Ise Jinguu is animism gone high-church.

    The Fox and the Jewel is a wakeup call. In it Dr. Smyers spotlights the issue of microvariations in Inari activities across the sweep of the archipelago. Her book challenges us to join in mapping this dazzling diversity of practices, and to explain how such a rainbow of actions can shine through the storms of grey words that preach Japanese cultural uniformity.

Wired Promontories
    The Shima Peninsula is on the extreme southern coast of Mie Prefecture. This is where Honshu sticks its left elbow into the Kuroshio before bending its left forearm to the southwest. Historically, this was an impoverished area whose people were obliged to pay tribute or taxes to power centers inland. Ise Jinguu, for instance, had control over the area a millennium ago, and one village still prepares a semiannual "gift" of dried abalone for the Great Shrines. Early in the 20th century Kookichi Mikimoto and his business partners colonized the quiet Shima bays, luring local families into absorbing the high risks of pearl aquaculture, leaving the Mikimoto corporation to harvest the high profits that can be realized by marketing the pearls globally. In the 1990s a new colonialism of services began replacing the old colonialism of goods: near the base of the Peninsula the Kintetsu Railways opened a theme park called Supainu Mura (Spanish Village). Locals now can pose as exotic dons and donnas. It adds a twist to something that Shima natives have long known---that their countrymen regard them as oddballs who live in Japan but are not quite of it. Divers have told me many times about a defining moment on their vacation trip to Tokyo some years ago. Hearing them gab in Shima dialect, so outlandish to his ears, a Tokyoite asked, Are you from Korea?

    With regard to Inari practices, however, Shima appears to be right in the mainstream. There is an Inari shrine on every little promontory along the shoreline---or so the locals told me soon after I arrived. They spoke of her not as Inari-san but as Yama-no-Kami-san, the capricious one who likes to send wind-shears down from the mountains. If you’re out in a small boat, diving or fishing over the reefs when a wind-shear blows offshore, it will make your day.

    Shima has a crenelated coastline: an irregular sequence of bulges and indentations of land alternating every fifty meters or so. (Technically it’s called a Lias-style Coast, after a prototype in Portugal.) Initially I had to take it on trust that each promontory is home to an Inari hokora: during my first season I discovered only one. The presumptive others were camouflaged by thickets of weeds and vines and bushes. It had been an exceptionally busy summer, people said, and nobody had the extra energy needed to organize a shoreline cleanup.

    Invisible gods I had heard of, but unvisible shrines? There were moments when I wondered if my gentle hosts and hostesses might be playing haze-the-stranger-with-folksy-hokum about hokora. Wrong. I didn’t know where the shrines are but they did. One virtue of extended fieldwork is that eventually some mysteries are spontaneously revealed. Things happen, and must be given meaning. One day a graduate student and I were sitting and talking with a team of abalone divers in their hut above the beach. The student announced that she had to answer a call---and she was not carrying a cell phone. A diver said to her in an offhand manner, you can go behind the hut, nobody passing on the road will be able to see you back there. Seconds after the student had stepped out of the doorway the divers erupted in a collective shout, and one of them raced after her. It had occurred to them that she would not know which bush behind the hut covers the house of Yama-no-Kami-san.

    The incident with the graduate student may have meant nothing, but when I came to Shima for my next stint of research that area behind the hut had been clear-cut. And in the center of the clearing was a new concrete-block shrine, spacious and sturdy by comparison with the typical shoreline hokora, which is a flimsy, off-the-rack, mass production wooden model. The explanation: that a diver on the team had had a spectacular catch last season, and the new shrine was her way of offering thanks to Inari-san.

    A woman remarked to Dr. Smyers that the national center of Inari practice in Fushimi is like a "department store of shrines" where one can procure all sorts of sacred goods and services. (page 163) By analogy, the less imposing but highly visible Inari shrines on the Peninsula---there are several, each about the size of a tool shed, painted in stop-sign red or in road-repair-sign tangerine---are the Seven-Elevens of religious consumerism. In our effort to make sense of localized Inari practices we probably should be using models borrowed from the Commerce Library as well as from the Religious Studies Reading Room. The economics of location may be as crucial as the symbols of soteriology.

    All the more so, it seems to me, when we turn to the unobtrusive, unpainted little shrinelets on each promontory. Not so garish as the chartreuse pay-phones or the glow-in-the-dark soft-drink-and-beer dispensers that punctuate the shoreline, the Inari hokora are every bit as numerous. They are, so to speak, supernatural ATMs: dispensers of bounty that people want close to home and of easy access at any hour. (Divers and boatmen, for example, usually go to the hokora before sunrise.) In point-of-sale retail distribution the three secrets of success are said to be location, location, and location. It’s a point worth keeping in mind when examining the ongoing regeneration of Inari practices. In some locales Inari-san is hard-wired into the cultural ecology. Local knowledge---the capacity to operate as a competent person---includes knowing the difference between where you can go to make meaning and where you should go to make water.

Weird Particularities
    An even more powerful engine generating micro-variation in Inari activities is a process that Dr. Smyers labels individualization or personalization. It is the process in which one selects among Inari symbols and names and practices, tailoring or home-cooking them until they become one’s own, "internally persuasive" (page 235).

        "Not only do ideas about Inari vary regionally, but they vary individually, even to the degree that Inari
        is worshiped under thousands of different names chosen by individual devotees" (page 13).

    Others before Dr. Smyers have remarked on, or recorded, astonishing amounts of plasticity and micro-variation in Japanese popular religious practices. A quarter-century ago, for example, Robert J. Smith conducted meticulous house-by-house surveys of "ancestor worship"---examining family altars and asking living members to identify each of the enshrined dead. He found that the majority of those honored with ihai in the altar are kin who have connections to the living that are predictable from modern-era norms of household succession.However, a sizable fraction of souls in the altars have no legal or normative bonds to their sheltering household; often their presence is simply weird.(See Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan, 1973).

    To put this into a different idiom, the butsudan is a locus for reactive variation, and for responding to the needs of others. People may die without leaving even a single survivor responsible for the care of their souls. An abandoned ihai is like an abandoned infant: how could any self-respecting human walk away and ignore it? No, take it home and instal it in your household altar.

    An Inari hokora, by contrast is a locus for pro-active variation, a launch-pad for expressing the needs and wishes of self. Dr. Smyers again:

        "The fox symbol, I argue, is at one level a metaphor for individuality: its shape shifting is a cultural fantasy
        for people with restricted mobility and constraints on personal expression." (page 14)

"Fantasy" often implies a put-down: that these people are mentally running away from their problems instead of confronting them. I think it more productive instead to go back to the root meaning of metaphor as a kind of shuttle bus, a transport, a vehicle. I would add Inari-san to the list of such vehicles that Japanese culture provides---as all cultures must in some form---so that we can deal actively with the fact that each of us is a biological individual and at the same time a social person.

    The auto-mobile, for example, has become a master metaphor for the power to move oneself around as an independent agent in an environment populated as much by machines as by persons. Having a car is more than a convenience, more than just a signal of one’s sex or status: without a car, one is socially incomplete, obliged to offer explanations for being mobility-challenged. In our motorized world, coming of age is defined more by obtaining one’s driver’s license than by gaining the right to vote or to sign contracts without parental approval. And the onset of senility is defined as much by the loss of that driver’s license as it is by physiological symptoms. It is not easy to separate what is "me" from what is maikaa.

    Seen from this angle, Inari-san begins to look like some sort of supernatural Nissan. Dr. Smyers quotes an array of Japanese sources who insist to her that more than any other Shinto god, Inari-san is customized and fitted to each individual’s measurements.

    "Inari is a different kami to each devotee," remarks a priest from Fushimi, "shaped by what each person brings of his own character, how he understands the world."(page 156) People readily refer to "my Inari-san", a phrase and concept that according to some Japanese scholars had already come into vogue by the 18th century. Priests at the "centers" of Inariism in Fushimi and Toyokawa fight losing battles when they attempt to impose an orthodoxy or orthopraxy upon supplicants. These Inari clergy look less like curators of a religious heritage, more like traffic police caught in a supernatural rush-hour, watching weird driver after weird driver roaring off in their different directions. If my-car is a way to inscribe one’s mark of personalness upon the physical landscape---to write an auto-biography with rubber on concrete rather than with ink on paper---my-Inari begins to look like its superphysical twin.

    What this suggests to me, with regard to probing for a deeper understanding of the dynamism of the my-Inari domain, is that the timeline of history offers less promise than the timeline of life-history. My-Inari is embedded not in a local spacescape or its social topography so much as in the timescapes of the lifecourse and its linked biographies.

Envoi
    Like no other book I have read on Japanese religiosity The Fox and the Jewel foregrounds the personal domains of life. Inari practices---the book’s subtitle suggests---are as much about private as about shared meanings. This is a fresh approach, when I remember what I was taught in graduate school (by Clifford Geertz, among others): that religion begins with the idea that things are not ours but we are theirs. Inariism looks like religion as the Wall Street Journal editorial page writers want it to be---privatized. Dr.Smyers has persuaded me that I need to carry this approach back to Shima and take another look. Should I thank her for providing me with an excuse for spending another season on the beach, obliged to subsist on fresh seafood?

    For the members of the Society, I would like to discuss the usefulness of Karen Smyers's The Fox and the Jewel for the study of Japanese religions generally. I will do so by suggesting that two issues raised in her book, those of the "individualization" and of the "private meanings" of Inari, appear not only in the case of Inari, but also with other deities in Japanese religion. By comparing her discussion of these two issues in the study of Inari with how they might pertain to the study of other deities, particularly Jizo, I hope to encourage the discussion of these issues more broadly. I will also, in turn, use these same comparisons to raise questions about the discussion of individualization and private meanings in The Fox and the Jewel.

Individualization
    Prof. Smyers did not confine her investigation of Inari to its centers of worship (Fushimi and Myogonji), but directed her fieldwork to its local peripheries as well. She also shows how those peripheries invade those centers, such as with the otsuka (rock altars) on Fushimi, to the degree that one could hardly consider one without the other. Instead of a clear demarcation of high and low, or center and periphery, therefore, we are confronted with an unimaginably complex network of Inari, in which the very distinctions among these Inari themselves exhibit an intricate morphology. Within the rubric of "Inari" there are different deities, different names provided by the kanjo (reinshrinement) system, and ambiguous gender.
    This variety leads Prof. Smyers to discuss "individualized" Inari, a term by which she indicates that each Inari is distinct from all others, while each invokes the shared semantics of jewel, fox, and musubi. These shared semantics she connects in some detail with the dynamics of Japanese society, particularly those between a surface homogeneity and the individual passions that it masks. (She advances as a telling detail the paintings of foxes acting in ordinary human situations.)
    By pointing out this "individualized" Inari, Prof. Smyers's work should prompt us to look beyond Inari to see if this individualization appears elsewhere in Japanese religion and to ask if other cases, too, can be served by such a Durkheimian interpretive strategy. The closest parallel that comes to my mind is that of Jizo, who is also mentioned in the book. In particular, I am reminded of an old essay by Yanagita Kunio on Jizo's surnames. ["Jizo-dono no Myoji," in Yanagita Kunio Shu, vol. 27 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1970), 289-91.] Included were the Splinter-Removing Jizo, the Horse-Leading Jizo, the Dirty-Feet Jizo, the Naked Jizo, and even the Pregnant Jizo. Contemporary folklore also confirms this huge variety of what Prof. Smyers might call individualized Jizo. Surely, there are many differences between Jizo and Inari. Chief among these is the fact that Jizo is iconic and Inari is not. Although Prof. Smyers reports that Inari's form has been seen by devotees and that many believe that the fox is Inari, Inari does not conventionally have a human-like body as Jizo does. This difference matters because Jizo's surnames largely depend on his having a body, as he assumes the suffering of believers in body-substitution (migawari) legends.
    Each in its own way, both deities take on individuality beyond classification, a fact which suggests that the emplacement of deities in Japan has engendered numerous mechanisms of individualization. In addition to the kanjo of Inari, there are branches of many of the major temples and shrines and replicable icons within certain Buddhist cults, such as that of Zenkoji. My own work on icons has suggested to me that every instance of individualization of Buddhist deities involves the authenticity guaranteed by iconographic correctness coupled with the vitality that gives an individualized icon the capacity to act at a particular place and time. Hence, a delocalized authenticity and a local vitality both appear necessary for Buddhist icons in Japan, but the boundary between, on the one hand, a deity's similarities with others whose name it shares and, on the other, its differences from them must always be negotiated and redefined.
    None of this denies the social metaphors that Prof. Smyers employs, but it does suggest that Inari participates in a larger theological problematic in Japanese religion that results from the inscription of deity in place. The theological and sociological are hardly mutually exclusive, but they are not quite the same either, and surely not all processes of individualization of Japanese deities can be explained by the social dynamics discussed in this volume. In the larger context of Japanese religion, then, the question arises of whether or not Inari alone is explained by the surface homogeneity and the individual passions of Japanese society. If Inari is unique in this respect, then perhaps that is due to its connections with the hidden areas of life, particularly the sexual. On the other hand, perhaps the case of Inari shares more with the individualization of other deities than is suggested by this volume. Only further comparative study can tell us.
    Nevertheless, Prof. Smyers's work challenges the rest of us to ask ourselves what we are referring to when we use the singular names of the deities of the Japanese pantheon. If we say "Kannon" or "Inari," instead of Kannons and Inaris or this Kannon and that Inari, are we making a rather priestly, theological claim of transcendence? Or just a convenient categorization of local deities who share a name and some common characteristics? Even if it is the latter, just what, then, does a statement like "Jizo is the protector of children" mean? After all, not all the Jizos in Japan are protectors of children. Such questions, however, probably should be condemned as over-philosophizing, especially since they ask for clarity in an area of Japanese religion in which ambiguity is required. Even if that is the case, we should still be aware that virtually every deity with a singular name has a capacity for self-individualization into multiple presences and that we should analyze and compare these capacities and the larger social and cultural needs they serve. Only then will we have the proper context for Inari's particular individualization.

Private meanings
    Through detailed and often delightful fieldwork reports, Prof. Smyers has shown that even individualized Inari have highly private meanings ascribed to them by individual devotees. As an anthropologist, she can, like the fox, cross borders and find these personal meanings, even though they are unknown among the devotees themselves. Here, too, is a claim that invites comparison with other areas of Japanese religion, for, as Prof. Smyers herself states (p. 151), private religion is pervasive in Japan. I believe that this point implies more than just the common-sense notion that every pilgrimage performance is different. Rather, it suggests that there are various specific means by which private concerns are accommodated in public spaces. Near the Tabata train station on Tokyo's Yamanote Line, for example, one finds the Red-Paper Nio. One buys the appropriate red paper from the temple and attaches it to the parts of the bodies of the two Nio corresponding to the place requiring healing on one's own body. (Apparently, summer brings athlete's foot; winter, hemorrhoids.) Involved in this issue of personal accommodation would be all such means of divination and wish-making, as well as the enormous consumer choice in the purchase of amulets. A comparative study of these means of accommodation, coupled with field work similar to that in this book, would show more of how private religion operates in Japan.
    At the same time, such a comparative study would provide a context for raising questions about Prof. Smyers's presentation of the private meanings of Inari. What, in the end, are the limits to Inari? Is there anything Inari would not do? Are there things Inari alone would do? In other words, there must be some limits -- or perhaps governors -- to these personal meanings ascribed to Inari as well as to other deities, so that there are reasons for individuals to choose one deity and not another. If so, we should be able to inquire as to how these limits are established and transmitted. And if there are such limits, perhaps the private meanings are not strictly private after all, but represent a private reinterpretation of the boundaries of the human needs and divine possibilities found publicly in each particular cult.
    One means of setting boundaries between deities appears latently but pervasively in The Fox and the Jewel but would be made explicit only through comparison with other deities -- namely, the role of human emotions. Inari not only responds to certain human needs but engenders in devotees who appear before him/her specific emotions that seem appropriate to both those human needs and their divine responses. Surely, this is, then, one means of limiting the variety of personal needs and responses in Inari worship. One could hardly imagine, for example, the sheer eeriness - perhaps "ambiguous awe" would serve as a more technical term - that Inari evokes being connected with (to return to the previous example) Jizo, and this distinction of emotions helps distinguish what their respective devotees hope to receive from these two deities. The distinction, I would further suggest, is tied very much to the non-verbal, generally visual signals and overall ambiance of each cult.

Why Inari?
    One of the striking features of The Fox and the Jewel is that it is the first book in a Western language on the most pervasive Japanese deity. The two themes of individualization and private meanings suggest why this is so. Individualization may seem to be something that anthropologists rather than historians of religions should spot, but attention to village-level field work cannot provide the national and historical context within which the process of localization must be studied. Only Prof. Smyers's attention to both anthropology and religious studies could have brought this process to the fore. As for private meanings, Thomas Luckmann claimed decades ago that private religion is invisible religion, a problem which has been compounded in Japanese religious studies by intense attention to the accommodation of individuals to groups. By researching Inari, Karen Smyers has simultaneously challenged the disciplinary habits and theoretical presumptions that have until now led to Inari's neglect. If a book should be judged on its effects beyond its particular subject, then, she is to be commended by us all.
 

  Aisatsu
         It is an honor to be able to discuss my book here today, and I would like to thank Jackie Stone and Bill Deal for making it possible. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Professors Plath and Foard for their thoughtful comments today, and for being very supportive of me early on in this project. I had no Japan expert in my department when I began this study as a graduate student, and both professors generously read early proposals and gave me valuable advice and direction. Additionally, I would like to thank the many people who helped me in the production and publication of this study—especially those who read and commented on the original 600 page version!

Main Arguments of the Book
         I will begin by summarizing the main points of the book for those of you who have not read it yet.

        My first goal was to describe the symbol of the Japanese fox in all its cultural complexity. Although the fox is inextricably associated with Inari now, it turns out that this symbol does not appear in Inari records for the first few centuries, and most likely came in through Shingon Buddhist connections. However, once the fox was thought to be the messenger of Inari, Inari’s fox took on many characteristics from the previously existing fox folklore, Chinese literary antecedents, and other cultural associations. This includes ideas about foxes as shape shifters, fox trickery and bewitchment, fox possession, fox gifts, foxes as associated with money, sexuality, and the fundamental wildness and amorality of nature.

        Probably the only constant I found in contemporary Inari practice was the insistence of priests, both Buddhist and Shinto, that Inari is not a fox. That is, the priests want to separate the deity itself from its messenger. However, not only do most Japanese not seem to make this distinction, but I think it is a fairly new one for priests, too, influenced by Meiji and post-Meiji pressures toward "rationality." One system of honji suijaku at Fushimi Inari from the Muromachi period lists three "original Buddhist forms" for three enshrined foxes, suggesting that the fox spirits were themselves seen as kami. The current resistance by priests seems to relate to the idea that animal worship is superstitious—this in spite of Motoori Norinaga’s classic definition of kami which includes such mysterious manifestations of kami as foxes.

        In most Inari shrines the fox symbol is paired with the wish-fulfilling jewel, which is perhaps even more ubiquitous than the fox as a motif. The jewel (often three jewels) in Inari resonates with the three peaks of Inari mountain in Kyoto where the deity was first worshipped, the three treasures of Buddhism, magical jewels in folk tradition which control the sea and prolong life, foxes’ treasure troves, and other kinds of spiritual and material treasure. The punning resemblance both linguistically and iconographically between tama and tamashii means that jewels are sometimes souls, which take the form of a fiery jewel when they manifest themselves to humans.

        To conduct this fieldwork, I lived for a year each at two centers of Inari worship, Fushimi Inari in Kyoto, and Toyokawa Inari in Aichi, a Soto Zen temple which also serves as an acolyte training facility. Although I suspected there would be differences between the centers based on their Shinto and Buddhist identities in the present, what I was not prepared for was the enormous amount of factionalism I found within each center. This problem became the focus of the study, most simply expressed as the tension between unity and diversity: the seeming coherence of Inari worship throughout Japan coupled with the almost infinite diversity I was increasingly discovering as I observed more sites and spoke with more priests and devotees. Individual devotees describe themselves as worshiping radically different kami as Inari: the name of the kami varies, it may be seen as Shinto or Buddhist, male or female in anthropomorphic form. Some see it as a snake, dragon, or fox. The most extreme diversity comes from the process called Inari kanjo. When people receive a portion of Inari to enshrine in their home, company, or otsuka rock altar, they usually give Inari a new name which does not include the name "Inari" itself. Some of these names (listed on page 162) are:

    Blue Jewel Great Deity (Aotama Okami)
    Sutra King Great Bodhisattva (Kyoo Daibosatsu)
    Abundant Waterfall (Toyotaki Myojin)
    Song Princess (Utahime Daimyojin)
    White Beard (Shirahige Okami)

Inari is worshipped under tens of thousands of these names that can be seen carved into the rock altars on Inari Mountain in Fushimi. Although names can be assigned by a priest, many seem to have originated from divine dreams and shamanic oracles. (I will return to this phenomenon of "my Inari" in a minute.)

        The two main questions then became: why, if all this diversity is real, is it not obvious to most Inari devotees themselves, and secondly, why does Inari not split into schisms as is the case with many other religious institutions in Japan? I found the answer to both questions in the ways people involved in Inari worship related to one another—and think this analysis probably holds true for many other cultural forms in Japan as well. The iconography and certain outward behaviors are common to most Inari worship sites, and these visual forms unite the complex. Most Inari worship sites include fox statues, the color red, the jewel symbol, cedar trees, the rice motif, and offerings of fried tofu. But most people involved in Inari worship do not talk with each other about their individual understandings, and because they are all doing roughly the same kind of devotion, the great diversity of interpretation is not seen. In short, lack of communication about personal understandings is what keeps the diversity hidden.

        When conversation does take place, this does not necessarily reveal much because shared meanings (tatemae) are articulated and these generalities fit most cases. It is only in situations of unity, or sometimes in private conversation with me during an interview, that a devotee or priest would reveal private understandings (honne) about Inari.

The "My Inari" Phenomenon
        The individualization of Inari is perhaps its most distinctive feature, and I still argue that this seems to be somewhat more pronounced in Inari than in most other religious forms in Japan (with the possible exception of ancestors, which is to be expected). However several scholars have raised important questions about my claims, so I will try to be more precise about what I think Inari does—and perhaps does differently.

        Because it was my goal to understand the breadth of the Inari phenomenon in the contemporary period, I limited my comparisons to various forms within Inari, and did not compare Inari with other religious figures in Japan. If I have provided us with a kind of "thick description" of Inari’s forms, functions, specialties, and cultural resonances, then it would seem that the next order of business is the comparative one. My answer to Professor Foard’s question is that it is not sufficient to explain Inari by a sociological model alone. However, showing how it functions in Japanese society may help us to answer his second question about the semantic limits of Inari. It seems from comments today and from an ongoing conversation I have been having with Ian Reader, that Inari is not as unusual as I first assumed in its ease of individualization. This is a feature common to many religious figures in Japan—and perhaps religious figures in general.

Personalization and Individualization
         My definitions for the terms personalization and individualization are as follows (see p. 235, note 2). By personalization, I mean the process by which the deity is made one’s own, made "internally persuasive" in Bakhtin’s term. By individualization, I mean the way that a new form of Inari is created or customized with new functions or identity. Clearly, there is some overlap in these terms, but I think it is useful to distinguish between them for heuristic purposes. Readers of the manuscript were correct to push me into using "individualization" for my main argument about Inari, for personalization is a much more general phenomenon found not only in many other forms of Japanese religiosity, but in religious devotion in general.

        As I was thinking abut the questions raised by Professors Foard and Plath concerning personalization, the soundtrack in my head kept replaying Elvis singing a hymn from the recording, Amazing Grace: His Greatest Sacred Performances. The words of this hymn are as follows:

My Jesus knows when I am lonely
He knows each pain, he sees each tear
He understands each lonely heartache
He understands because he cares
Refrain:
My Jesus knows just what I need
Oh yes, he knows just what I need
He satisfies, and every need supplies
Yes, he knows just what I need

The "my own deity" phenomenon is clearly not limited to Inari or Japan. We can think of numerous examples of saints with a religious division of labor, localized Madonnas, and cultural reinterpretations of world religious figures to fit the local terrain.
 It may be that a certain balance needs to exist between universal and particular forms for a religious figure to be culturally and personally viable. Foard calls this "delocalized authority" and "localized vitality." Reader and Tanabe, in Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan (1998:176), call it "generalization and localization" and also "divinization and personalization." Bakhtin calls it the "authoritative word" and the "internally persuasive word." I referred to the same tension as between "shared and private meanings" to get at the specific dynamics of the Japanese example. Individualization refers more specifically to the development of new forms, functions, localizations, and identities of the deity, and perhaps should refer to the public identities of refigured deities in comparison with internalized personal understandings.

        If this distinction is heuristically useful, then the question about semantic limits pertains to individualization, for personalization, if kept private, can be as diverse and idiosyncratic as people choose. Individualization, on the other hand, would seem to be limited by some set of cultural assumptions about what appropriately constitutes a particular deity. In Otherworld Journeys (1987), Carol Zalesky shows that the narration of even an intensely personal near death experience is unconsciously shaped by certain elements and parameters operating at a given time in a society about what constitutes such an experience. Even more apt, perhaps, is Gannanath Obeyesekere’s demonstration in Medusa’s Hair (1981) of what kind of religious innovation is accepted by the community. When the new religious symbol or practice created by a Sri Lankan ascetic resonated with certain cultural ideas shared by others, the innovation became established. But when it was too personal, too alien, too outside the bonds of cultural semantic limits, the innovation was ignored and the person seen merely as mad, not religiously inspired.

         I had assumed without adequate comparative research that it was Inari’s lack of scriptural narrative and scriptural basis that facilitated such proliferation of form. However, Reader and Tanabe have convincingly shown, using examples of Jizo and Kobo Daishi, that in fact "people know a lot about Jizo because much has been said and written about him—and this knowledge makes for detailed familiarity and intimacy" (1998:144).
 
        If some deities are easier to individualize than others, this may depend merely on the lack of dogmatic prohibitions against such attitudes, and possibly on the deity not being too distantly transcendent to inspire such moves. Reader and Tanabe argue that personalization "is a major characteristic of Japanese common religion," also seen in the worship of Kannon, Kobo Daishi, Fudo, and the Seven Lucky Gods, to name a few. They do concede that "we would agree with Smyers that Inari is the most personalized in terms of having the largest number of personalized ("my own Inari") forms...." (144). I am now inclined to think this has less to do with the characteristics of Inari per se, and more to do with two historical phenomena associated with Inari worship: first, the early and continued ease of reenshrining Inari (the kanjo system), and second, the large shamanic element associated with Inari. Through both of these phenomena, Inari was easily dispersed, decentralized, reinterpreted, updated, and made local.

The Semantic Limits of Inari
        Professor Foard’s question about the semantic limits of Inari allows us to focus on the differences between Inari and other Japanese religious figures. Is there some reason people choose to worship Inari rather than Jizo, Kannon, or Sarutahiko?
If we look at the three main ways that people come to Inari worship, we realize the choice is usually not a rational decision. Inari devotees often worship Inari as a tradition received from parents or spouse, or because their local shrine or temple enshrines an Inari. The second path is when Inari chooses the devotee, that is, appears in a divine dream, or manifests herself in a mysterious event at an Inari shrine. A related path is when a shamanic healer instructs a client to worship Inari as the cure for some specific malady. Finally, some people may select Inari based on current ideas of this-worldly benefits, by consulting either a genze riyaku handbook or the advice of friends. However, these days there is such a proliferation of the functions of most divine figures that many roles overlap: both Jizos and Inaris can be found for academic success, business prosperity, safe childbirth, and so on.
 
        Is there, then, anything uniquely defining about Inari’s identity or roles? There seems to be less clear division of labor among religious figures in Japan than I had originally assumed, at least in the present day. However, I do not think the functions or semantic limits of Inari and, for example, Jizo, are identical. Because I have not studied Jizo in enough depth to make authoritative comparisons, I will suggest possible differences about Inari for comparative consideration.  First, Inari seems to have a reputation for fierce retribution (tatari, bachi) if offended or ignored. Related to this is a kind of "dark side" which comes from the negative side of some of the folk aspects of Inari. In addition to fierce tatari, people (at least historically) worried about fox possession, fox sorcery, fox bewitchment, and fox tricks in connection with Inari. And this brings us to the second characteristic that must define some of its semantic limits: Inari’s continued association with (or identification as) a fox. The fox as an animal known for its inability to be tamed suggests certain amoral qualities of nature that cannot be brought totally under human control but which must be respected and dealt with nonetheless. The association of Inari with rice since the earliest written sources also emphasizes cycles of nature that must be accommodated. However, comparative work needs to be done to clarify this question further.

Call for Additional Studies
         Finally, I want to note that much more work needs to be done on Inari, historically and textually as well as anthropologically. Thanks to Fushimi Inari Taisha, many historical documents (including Buddhist ones from Aizenji, the Shingon temple at Fushimi Inari until Meiji) have been collected and published (even though the shrine is somewhat selective about who they will give or sell the volumes to). Material from other shrines and temples surely languishes in storehouses and libraries. The Inari along the Ise seacoast that Professor Plath described, as well as the virtually countless other forms of localized Inari also need to be studied to provide more information about how the needs of varying geographic areas and ways of life shape religious forms. Additional historical and anthropological studies will illuminate the development and proliferation of Inari and give us more comparative materials with which to refine our understandings of the similarities and differences among religious figures in Japan.