inari festival branding

Fox Labyrinth is an event that is inspired from the Inari-fox festival in Japan and aims to let the audience understand more about the festival through the meaning behind the foxes and the deity, Inari. 

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Based on the significance of these three keywords : Harvest, Fertility and Duality, I managed to derive the concept for this project. The main idea is inspired from the word 'orbit', the word ‘orbit’ means a repeated cycle or course of direction. In the four directions, there is a representation for each direction which constitutes the four themes. 

‘Labyrinth’ is derived from the keyword ‘orbit’. The definition of labyrinth means a complicated course of passages. The word ‘labyrinth’ suggests the idea of a maze and the idea of life, is seen as a maze, only to overcome the different aspects in life. 

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The four activities will be based on this four aspects of life. It is based on the rationale of modern people thinking that only by succeeding in life, then they can talk about relationships and forming a family and having the next generation and gradually followed by death during old age. 

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The activity that represents success '胜' is the o-mikuji.

The activity that represents love '情', is the making and giving of the warabimochi. 

Fertility '怀' is represented by the  rice harvesting ritual.

The activity that represents death '亡' is fox kagura dance. 

Bringing in the idea of orbit from Chinese culture, the identity is based upon the idea of optical illusion and the meanings of the four directions (情,亡,胜,怀). Hence, without using the words itself to represent, the various elements are derived from the four words. The idea of the optical illusion is used to represent the manifestations of the fox.

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