God of Cough Drops

Between depression and sinuses I wasted half of a generous four-day weekend (I took Friday off sick) before I finally started writing again.

And promptly hit a snag -- the kind of snag I could (and probably should) have just powered through. See, I decided to add a Shinto Priest to explain a bit about the Inari Shrine to my protagonist, and it seemed a fun idea to give him an errand to "deliver letters to the kami that helps cure coughs." 

Which I knew about -- I'd run into this reference of letters being hand-delivered -- but I'd forgotten to put down the name of the god and I also had no idea where they were in the actual shrine complex.

Oh, yes. And it seemed amusing to have him come up and help Penny when she's trying to ask someone at the food stalls where to get kitsune-udon. The fun answer is that there are cafes/tea houses all the way up the 4 km trail to the peak of Inari-yama. Sort of. See, I knew they were there because I saw them when I was there.

But this, also, was miserably hard to research. I was finally making progress when I also found the god I'd been thinking of. And a little more map digging and searching and I found where the shrine for that god is. And on that same map was one of the teahouses with an actual name to it.

And following up on that turned up the only detailed source (a Japanese blog) to the teashops that are actually on the mountain.

Gods, I hate the structure of the internet. No matter whether it is search engines or link sites or aggregators or help pages or speciality sites, it is all there to funnel you towards what everybody else can usually be convinced to purchase. It is the Tragedy of the Commons written in digital ink.

So easy to find five thousand pages on Fushimi Inari Taisha (the engines deciding that nothing else in my enquiry could possibly be as important as telling, once again, that this is an Inari shrine in Kyoto and has lots of torii gates. Um...got that part already!) Also easy to find teahouses and cafes all the hell over Kyoto. But finding the places that are on the damned trail between the spans of the Senbon Torii? Yeah.

Oh, by the way:

Oseki-san
Fushimi Inari Taisha
68 Fukakusa Yabunouchi-cho
Fushimi-ku, Kyoto-shi
Kyoto 612-0882
Japan

My sinus headache is coming back. Maybe I'll send a postcard myself.