Kitsune Myōbu

The myōbu (命婦) is, in the Japanese tradition, the white fox in the service of Inari Ōkami, the deity of rice, fertility, commerce and prosperity. The name is not the animal's own: myōbu was a Heian court title for middle-ranking ladies admitted to the palace, and it was applied to the fox because its office is the same, going in and out of the god's dwelling carrying messages. It belongs to the class of the zenko (善狐), the benevolent foxes, and is distinguished from the wild yako by its purity and its sacred bond. According to folklore, a kitsune that shows exceptional virtue by protecting crops or helping pilgrims may be raised by Inari to this service, and then its coat turns white: it is the byakko (白狐), the white fox that the iconography always shows with a single tail. The nine tails do not belong to it but to the millennial fox of solitary cultivation. These messenger foxes inhabit and guard the shrines of Inari, of which there are tens of thousands scattered throughout Japan, the most famous being the Fushimi Inari Taisha of Kyoto, renowned for its tunnels of thousands of vermilion torii.

The myōbu acts as an intermediary between Inari and the faithful: it transmits blessings of abundant harvest, mercantile prosperity and success, and inspires prophetic dreams in devout farmers and merchants. It is credited with the ability to move between the shrines of Inari, to take human form in order to deal with chosen priests and to punish the profanation of sacred places. Unlike the yako, it does not practise kitsune-tsuki, fox possession; on the contrary, the shrines of Inari were precisely where one went to have a possession undone. Lafcadio Hearn, who travelled the shrines of Izumo around 1890, noted that Inari's fox is invisible to ordinary mortals and shows itself only when it wishes. Its usual image is that of a white vixen sometimes carrying in her mouth a jewel (the hōju or nyoi-hōju, the «jewel that grants wishes»), a key to the rice granary, a sheaf or a scroll, attributes that appear on the pairs of fox statues flanking the shrines.

The iconography of the myōbu is omnipresent in the cult of Inari: the white fox statues with the jewel or the key, the vermilion torii and the offerings of rice, sake and aburaage. Its whiteness symbolizes purity and its sacred condition, in contrast with the wild fox. The link between the fox and the rice cult, deeply rooted in rural Japan, made the myōbu one of the most beloved protective figures of popular Shinto. Within the family of the nine-tailed fox, it represents the benevolent path of elevation, that of the fox that ascends by virtue and service to a deity, in contrast to the path of solitary cultivation (the tenko) or that of predation (the yako).