Mizuinari-jinja

During my extensive research, AKA skimming the wikipedia page, it seems that:

This shrine is really old. (Circa 941 😱)

It used to be somewhere which is now the Waseda campus. (It's now across the street from it.)

I was imagining that Waseda had some connection to the shrine, because Waseda (早稲田) contains one of the same kanji as inari (稲荷). Long story short, no, not beyond the fact that both things are related to the harvest, like just about everything else. Waseda used to be the cow place, next to the high horse place, but then it got renamed to the early rice place. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Kyoto Brewing Company is delivering six-packs of good craft beer for reasonable prices. By "reasonable prices," I mean that it's cheaper than buying craft beer at a bar, if going to a bar and purchasing a craft beer was actually a thing you could do. Their selection seems to be changing quite frequently, which is great if what you like is variety. Since I like variety, I negotiated a trade with a co-worker who had bought a different six-pack. A couple of my 春の気まぐれ (a pale ale) for a couple of his 夜空を藍染め (a berry sour).

We attempted to conduct the trade in a socially distanced manner. We handed the beers off, one by one, in order to stay at arms' length, awkwardly stretching our hands as far away from our vulnerable orifices as we could. Now that I think about it, we could have set the beers on the ground in a neutral zone and then retrieved the beers. Like we were trying to set up some exchange in which neither could double-cross the other and try and grab all the goods for themselves.

It's been a few weeks since the trade and neither of us is dead. We can employ more advanced strategies next time, I guess.

On the way back from this exchange, I stopped by this shrine, which I had never bothered to investigate when I was at Waseda. Fox (inari) shrines tend to be just a small altar off to the side of another, larger shrine, so I like seeing them stand on their own.