Tanuki Trickster Tales

The tanuki is the Japanese raccoon dog, and in the folkloric imagination it is the warm, well-fed, slightly ridiculous cousin of the kitsune. Where the fox is a creature of long memory, of careful cultivation, and occasionally of considerable menace, the tanuki is a creature of appetite, of high spirits, and of comic transformation. The tanuki is a master of disguise, a lover of sake, a shape-shifter of the most cheerful kind, and a folkloric figure whose most famous attribute — an outsize pair of golden testicles, depicted on the medieval ink-stones and in the modern garden statuary — is still a feature of the Japanese popular imagination.

The Animal in the Older Japanese World

The tanuki is, biologically, the raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), a sturdy, short-legged canid native to East Asia. The folkloric tanuki is a long way from the animal. The shape-shifting ability of the tanuki was probably suggested by the animal’s broad behavioural repertoire and was reinforced by the older Japanese folk-etymology that linked the word tanuki to the verb “to not be.” The tanuki was the animal that, in the older rural Japan, was most often blamed for strange occurrences. A garden gate was found open; the rice was missing; a horse was restless in the night. The answer was almost always the tanuki.

Henge and the Magical Leaf

The tanuki’s main supernatural ability is the henge, the taking of human form. The kitsune takes its time about it, accumulating power over centuries. The tanuki is more sudden. With a leaf placed on its forehead and the appropriate incantation, the tanuki can become anything: a man, a woman, a tea-kettle, a tea-bowl, a long-nosed goblin, a beautiful geisha, a Buddhist priest, a teahouse customer. The henge of the tanuki is rarely used for menace and almost always for fun, and the typical tanuki story ends with the trickster exposed, chastened, and given a small bowl of sake by the farmer it has just deceived.

The “eight virtues” (hachibunshin no tsutome, 八分身の務) of the tanuki are a formal list of the tanuki’s repertoire: the hat, the tail, the eyes, the testicles, the belly, the girdle, the bag, and the leaf. The hat is invisible and can be worn to become a Buddhist priest; the tail is so strong that the tanuki can swing from it like a rope; the testicles are enormously long and can be unrolled like a straw mat; the belly is so large that the tanuki can make it look like a rock or a hill; the leaf is the key to the henge.

The Suzuri, the Testicles, and the Medieval Image

The single most distinctive image of the tanuki in the older Japanese folkloric tradition is the medieval suzuri, the ink-stone that the tanuki wears around its neck. The suzuri in question is enormous, of golden colour, and shaped like the outsize scrotum of the tanuki. The image is a clear piece of comic visual hyperbole, and it has been reproduced on a thousand pieces of folk art, from the woodblock prints of the Edo period to the modern garden statues.

The image is not, despite its comic appearance, simply a piece of vulgarity. In the older Japanese folk-religion, the testicles were a sign of fertility, of prosperity, and of the benevolent abundance of the harvest. The tanuki was the kami of the rice-field in some older districts, and the golden testicles were a sign that the harvest would be rich. The image was a piece of folk-religious symbolism that had been taken up into the comic visual tradition.

Bunbuku Chagama: The Tea-Kettle Tanuki

The most famous of the tanuki stories is the tale of Bunbuku Chagama, the tea-kettle tanuki. A Buddhist priest was given a tea-kettle by a grateful traveller; the kettle was handsome, and the priest used it regularly. One day, when the kettle was placed on the fire for the tea ceremony, it sprouted a head, four legs, and a tail, and the tea-kettle jumped out of the hearth and ran off. The priest, far from being angry, was delighted. He trained the kettle-tanuki to perform tricks in the temple, and it became a kind of mascot. The story is, on the surface, a simple one about a friendly tanuki and a charitable priest; underneath, it is one of the deeper stories about the relationship between the human and the natural worlds in the older Japanese imagination.

The Rivalry of Kitsune and Tanuki

The kitsune and the tanuki are often played off against each other in the older tales, and the rivalry is one of the deeper rhythms of the Japanese folkloric imagination. The kitsune is a serious cultivator, accumulating power over centuries; the tanuki is a quick-change artist of the moment. The kitsune is associated with the Inari shrine, with the kami of the harvest, and with the long history of the fox-spirit tradition in China and Korea. The tanuki is associated with the rural village, the drinking party, and the broad humour of the medieval picture-scroll. The rivalry is, on the whole, a friendly one.

The kitsune and the tanuki are part of a wider global bestiary of trickster animals. The Reynard fox of the European medieval tradition, the Anansi spider of West Africa, the Coyote of the Native American folklore, and the Raven of the Pacific Northwest all play the same kind of game with the cosmic order. The Japanese tricksters are unusual for being a pair rather than a single figure, and the way the two roles are distributed between them — the fox as the long-game seductress, the tanuki as the short-term clown — is one of the more interesting pieces of folkloric typology.

Tanuki in the Festivals, the Gardens, and the Restaurants

The modern tanuki is a familiar figure of the Japanese streetscape. The tanuki statue, with its broad smile, its straw hat, its flask of sake, and its enormous golden testicles, is a fixture outside the better izakaya of the country. The statue is a sign of welcome, of prosperity, and of the willingness of the establishment to feed its customers well. The tanuki is also a fixture of the older gardens, where the stone tanuki can be found at the corner of a path, in the shade of a tree, or under a bridge.

The festival use of the tanuki is more limited than that of the kitsune. The kitsune has the Inari cult behind it; the tanuki has no major shrine. But the tanuki appears in the local matsuri of many districts, especially in the Shikoku and the Kansai regions, and the tanuki dance (tanuki odori) is a particular feature of the local festivals of the warmer southern districts. The folkloric kinship of the tanuki with the Chinese huli jing and the Korean gumiho is closer than is often realised; the three are part of the same east Asian tradition of the long-lived animal spirit, and the tanuki’s special contribution is the comic register.

The Tanuki in the Modern Popular Imagination

The tanuki has had a remarkable modern career. The Studio Ghibli film Pom Poko depicts a community of tanuki in the hills of Tama, west of Tokyo, who use their henge powers to defend their forest against the developers. The film is at once a folkloric retelling and a modern environmental parable, and the image of the tanuki with its golden testicles, the straw hat, and the flask of sake is now a global pop-cultural shorthand for the older Japanese folkloric world. The “bamboo-bark-dragger” (takenoko-kui-tanuki) is the modern epithet for the customer who eats without paying, and the figure is still a part of the everyday Japanese vocabulary in a way that few folkloric figures anywhere in the world are.

Sources and Further Reading

Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Yōkai. Counterpoint, 2015.
Casal, U. A. The Goblin Fox and Badger and Other Witch Animals of Japan. Artibus Asiae, 1959.
Asquith, Pamela J., and Kalland, Arne, eds. Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives. Curzon, 1997.
Ashkenazy, Michael. The Tale of the Tanuki. Stone Bridge Press, 2023.