Fushimi Inari's fox statues are not decorative animals but messengers, and the god they serve is one most visitors already have some connection to without realising it.
Foxes as messengers, not the god itself
The stone fox statues found throughout the shrine grounds represent kitsune, understood in this context as messengers serving Inari, the deity of rice, agriculture, sake and, by extension in more recent centuries, general business prosperity, rather than being worshipped as deities in their own right, a distinction visitors sometimes miss given how central the fox imagery is to the shrine's visual identity.
Why businesses pay for the gates
Inari's association with prosperity and successful harvests extended naturally, as Japan's economy industrialised, to businesses seeking success more generally, which is the underlying reason companies and individuals sponsor the shrine's famous torii gates as this entry's companion article describes, treating the donation as an investment in continued good fortune consistent with centuries of agricultural precedent rather than a modern invention.
One of thousands of Inari shrines
Fushimi Inari is the head shrine of a network of tens of thousands of Inari shrines across Japan, making it the origin point of one of the country's most widely replicated forms of Shinto devotion rather than an isolated single site.