Tanuki

What is a tanuki?

The tanuki (狸) is two things at once. It is a real animal, the Japanese raccoon dog, a small, round, masked member of the dog family that lives in forests and on the edges of towns across Japan. And it is one of the best-loved figures in Japanese folklore: the bake-danuki, or "shapeshifting tanuki", a trickster that can take on the form of people and objects, play tricks on travellers and beat its belly like a drum.

Because the animal is unfamiliar outside East Asia, English writers have long struggled with the name. Nineteenth-century translators usually called it a "badger", and modern ones sometimes call it a "raccoon". It is neither: raccoons and badgers belong to entirely different families. In this encyclopedia we simply say tanuki.

Where its rival the fox (kitsune) is elegant, aloof and often dangerous, the tanuki of later folklore is comic, greedy, sociable and a little foolish. That reputation has made it a symbol of good cheer and good business, and its pottery likeness now stands outside shops, inns and eateries all over Japan.

Appearance and powers

The folklore tanuki looks much like the real one, only more so: plump, round-bellied, with a dark mask around the eyes. Its great gift is transformation. A tanuki can appear as a monk, a beautiful woman, a teakettle, a lantern or a whole phantom house, and it uses these shapes to deceive. A Japanese saying holds that "the fox has seven transformations, the tanuki eight", making the tanuki one degree better at disguise, though the basis of the ranking is unclear, and in many stories the two animals swap roles.

Two other traits run through tanuki lore. The first is the belly drum: tanuki are said to puff up their stomachs and drum on them, a habit already described in the Honchō Shokkan, an encyclopedia of foodstuffs published in 1697. Old Edo had its own version of the mystery, tanuki-bayashi, the sound of festival drumming heard deep in the night with no musicians anywhere to be found. It was counted among the "seven mysteries" of the Honjo and Banchō districts, and a legend of Shōjō-ji temple in Kisarazu, about tanuki dancing in the temple garden, became a famous children's song.

The second trait is the one visitors to Japan notice first: the tanuki's enormous scrotum. Edo-period humour exaggerated it without limit; a saying claims it can be stretched to cover eight tatami mats, and in some folktales a tanuki spreads it out as a room to fool travellers, only to be found out when someone drops a pipe ember or a needle on the "floor". One frequently repeated explanation links the image to Kanazawa, where goldsmiths are said to have wrapped gold in tanuki skin to beat it into leaf; the connection is plausible but best treated as a tradition rather than a proven origin.

Origins and history

Shapeshifting tanuki are very old. The Nihon Shoki, the eighth-century court chronicle, records under the thirty-fifth year of Empress Suiko (627) that in Mutsu, in the far north, there was an animal that "turned into a human and sang". The character used, 狢, can mean several burrowing animals, but Japanese scholarship generally reads it here as tanuki, making this the earliest widely recognised record of a transforming tanuki. Tanuki also appear in the Buddhist tale collection Nihon Ryōiki and in the medieval Uji Shūi Monogatari.

These early tanuki are uncanny rather than funny. The lovable, pot-bellied trickster is largely a creation of the Edo period (1603–1868), when tanuki tales multiplied in print, in picture books and in local legend, and some powerful tanuki were even worshipped at shrines.

Famous legends

Bunbuku Chagama. The "lucky teakettle" is the best-known tanuki story, and it exists in two quite different forms. The version told at Morin-ji, a Sōtō Zen temple founded in 1426 in Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture, concerns a priest named Shukaku who served the temple and owned a kettle that never ran dry, providing tea for more than a thousand monks at a great service. Long afterwards he was found to be a tanuki (some tellings say a mujina) and departed. The temple still keeps the kettle, which visitors can view, and tanuki statues line its approach. The fairy-tale version, which reached English as early as 1871 in A. B. Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, starts with a kettle at Morin-ji that sprouts the head and tail of a tanuki when set over the fire. The alarmed priest sells it to a tinker; the kettle-tanuki performs in a travelling show, walks a tightrope, makes the tinker rich, and is finally returned to the temple as a treasure.

Kachi-kachi Yama. The "Crackling Mountain" shows the tanuki at its darkest. A tanuki captured by an old farmer tricks the farmer's wife into freeing it, kills her, and serves her to her husband as soup. A hare avenges her: it sets fire to the bundle of sticks on the tanuki's back, treats the burns with a pepper poultice, and finally lures it onto the river in a boat made of clay, which crumbles. The tale is a reminder that the comic tanuki of today grew out of a much more dangerous animal.

The tanuki of Shikoku and Sado. Shikoku is especially rich in tanuki legend. Tokushima (old Awa Province) tells of a great war between tanuki factions led by Kinchō and Rokuemon, and one celebrated tanuki lord, Inugami Gyōbu, is said to command 808 followers. On Sado Island, Danzaburō-danuki was so powerful that he was enshrined as a popular deity. Shibaemon of Awaji Island and the Hage-tanuki of Yashima in Kagawa are also often listed among the great tanuki of Japan.

In art and pop culture

The tanuki statues that greet customers outside restaurants and shops are a modern tradition. Their standard form is credited to the potter Fujiwara Tetsuzō, who settled in Shigaraki in Shiga Prefecture in 1936. When Emperor Hirohito visited Shigaraki in 1951, the town lined his route with flag-waving tanuki, a scene that delighted him and drew national attention. The well-known "eight lucky traits" of the statue were devised only in 1952: a hat for preparedness, big eyes for good judgement, a smiling face, a large belly for calm resolve, a sake flask, a promissory note for trustworthiness, a money purse, and a sturdy tail.

On screen, Studio Ghibli's Pom Poko (1994), directed by Takahata Isao, follows a community of tanuki using every transformation they know to resist the bulldozing of the Tama Hills outside Tokyo for a new town, gathering much of the old lore into one film.