Fushimi Inari Taisha

Ten thousand vermillion torii gates march up a mountainside in an unbroken tunnel of red, and the further you walk, the fewer people there are, until it's just you and the mountain and the foxes. Fushimi Inari is the single most visited place in Japan — beating every Tokyo skyscraper and every Osaka street food alley — and the reason is simple: nothing else on Earth looks like this.

The shrine is dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice, sake, and prosperity. The torii gates have been donated by businesses praying for success — each gate has the donor's name and date painted on the back in black kanji. The practice started centuries ago and never stopped, so the mountain is now sheathed in layer upon layer of gates, some weathered to a pale pink, others still blazing orange. The smaller paths off the main trail have miniature torii the size of paperbacks, stacked in clusters like offerings to a different scale of deity.

Most tourists walk the first 20 minutes, take a photo, and turn back. The full hike to the summit of Mount Inari takes about two hours and passes through dense forest, past hidden shrines guarded by stone foxes with red bibs, and up to a viewpoint where Kyoto sprawls below like a model city. The foxes are Inari's messengers — you'll see them everywhere, in stone and bronze, sometimes holding a key in their mouth (to the rice granary) or a jewel (representing the spirit). Come at dawn or dusk when the light filters through the gates and the tourists haven't arrived. Or come at midnight — the shrine never closes, and the gates lit by lanterns in the dark are genuinely otherworldly.