Within Shinto specifically, as distinct from the much wider body of Japanese fox folklore, the kitsune's clearest institutional role is as Inari's shinshi, or divine messenger. Inari is one of Japan's most widely worshipped kami, presiding over rice, agriculture more broadly and, by extension in later centuries, over trade and prosperity, and the fox came to be so closely identified with this cult that many worshippers popularly, if inaccurately, treat Inari and the fox as interchangeable. Stone kitsune statues flank the approach to Inari shrines in matched pairs, typically holding a key symbolizing the granary, a jewel symbolizing the deity's spirit, a sheaf of ripened rice or a scroll in their mouths, and offerings of fried tofu, said to be a fox delicacy, are still left at these shrines today.
Fushimi Inari Taisha south of Kyoto, head shrine of an estimated thirty thousand Inari shrines across Japan, is famous above all for its tunnels of thousands of vermilion torii gates donated by worshippers over centuries, each inscribed with a donor's name, climbing the sacred Mount Inari behind the main shrine buildings. The association is old enough that by the medieval period, Inari worship and kitsune veneration had become largely inseparable in popular practice, even as Shinto priests maintained doctrinally that the fox served the kami rather than embodying it.