February; Inari Shrine Fesival

February — Inari Shrine Festival presents the celebration of the rice deity at one of Japan's most widely worshipped Shinto presences — the Inari, whose red-gated shrines dotted every neighborhood in Japan, and whose major festivals drew enormous crowds of devotees and petitioners. The Inari festival, with its parade of fox figures (the deity's messenger), red lanterns, and offerings of fried tofu, provided Mori with a subject of considerable visual richness and popular religious feeling. His rendering would have captured both the devotional seriousness of the observance and the festive energy that accompanied all of Japan's major shrine celebrations.