It is not a raccoon and it is not a badger. Nyctereutes procyonoides is a real wild canid — the raccoon dog, a dog-family animal with a raccoon's facial markings, native to East Asia, common enough in Japan to be a regular roadkill statistic and a regular nuisance in suburban roof spaces. English translations have been calling it the wrong animal for a century and a half, and the mistranslation is worth correcting because the folklore is entirely about a specific creature's actual behaviour.
An animal that plays dead
The wild tanuki has a well-documented habit of freezing or feigning death when startled, which in Japanese has its own verb, tanuki-neiri, "tanuki sleep", used of a person pretending not to notice something. It is nocturnal, omnivorous, raids farms, is easily trapped, and was hunted for fur and eaten.
A common animal that appears in the yard at night, apparently dies when cornered and then runs off when you turn your back is a plausible starting point for a shapeshifter. Where the fox got a reputation for cold, calculated deception, the tanuki got one for clumsy, comic, elaborate pranks that mostly go wrong — and the pairing of the two as rival transformers, kitsune to tanuki no bakashi ai, is a set phrase for two con artists trying to swindle each other.
Teakettles and revenge
Two folktales carry most of the tradition.
Bunbuku Chagama is the good-natured one. A tanuki, freed from a trap or simply feeling generous, turns itself into a fine iron teakettle for a poor man to sell. The buyer, a priest at Morin-ji in Tatebayashi, puts it on the fire; it sprouts legs, a head and a tail and bolts. Returned to the poor man, it proposes a business: he tours it as a tightrope-walking teakettle and they both become rich. Morin-ji still displays a kettle.
Kachi-kachi Yama is not good-natured at all. A tanuki kills an old farmer's wife, cooks her, and serves her to her husband. A rabbit avenges the murder methodically — setting a load of firewood alight on the tanuki's back, treating the burns with a pepper paste, and finally supplying it with a boat made of mud that dissolves in the middle of a lake, where it drowns. Edo and Meiji editions softened it in stages, and modern children's versions have removed the cannibalism entirely. It is the standard example in Japanese scholarship of how much a folktale can be sanded down within a century.
The eight attributes of a pottery tanuki
Stand outside a Japanese restaurant, bar or sake shop and there is a good chance of finding a ceramic tanuki by the door — usually Shigaraki ware, from the kilns in Shiga prefecture that have made them in bulk since the early twentieth century. The design is codified, and it is a shop-owner's charm rather than a piece of ancient religion.
The conventional eight features each carry a reading:
- A straw hat, against trouble and bad weather.
- Large eyes, to see one's surroundings and judge correctly.
- A sake flask, standing for virtue.
- A big belly, for calm and decisiveness.
- A promissory note or ledger in the other hand, for trust — the bill is always unpaid, which is the joke.
- An oversized tail, for steadiness and a good ending.
- A friendly face.
- Enormous testicles, for financial luck.
The last one is not a euphemism and Japanese sources do not treat it as one. The phrase kin no tama, golden orbs, puns on gold, and the motif almost certainly comes from the goldbeaters' trade: gold leaf was hammered inside a pouch of tanuki skin, which was said to allow a small piece of gold to be spread across a huge area. Edo prints run the joke into surrealism, showing tanuki using theirs as boats, fishing nets, umbrellas and drums.
They are also credited with drumming on their bellies, tanuki-bayashi, a sound heard in the woods at night with no drummer to be found. Real tanuki do not do this; the sound is usually attributed to a bird, a distant festival, or nothing at all.
Not a deity, but close to one
The tanuki is a yōkai, not a kami, and calling it a god is the usual error. But the boundary leaks in the usual way: it is enshrined at a few sites, treated as a messenger at a handful of shrines, and its statue functions as a luck object indistinguishable in use from a religious charm. There are named tanuki with cults in Shikoku, whose legends include a full-scale supernatural war between two tanuki factions in the nineteenth century — a story that has its own local literature and a monument.
Shikoku is the tanuki heartland, since it has no native foxes to compete with, and its tanuki are correspondingly grander.
Pom Poko, Mario, and a nearly perfect adaptation
Studio Ghibli's Pom Poko (1994), directed by Isao Takahata, is the rare case of a modern work that gets a folklore creature exactly right: tanuki resisting the destruction of their hills by a Tokyo new-town development, using every transformation trick in the traditional repertoire — including a spectacular parade of yōkai staged as a public event, and including the testicles, which the English dub renamed as "pouches" to universal amusement. It is also a genuinely sad film about losing, which is a fair reflection of where the tanuki usually ends up.
Super Mario Bros. 3 gave the West the tanooki suit in 1988, complete with the statue transformation, which is a direct reference to shapeshifting that almost nobody outside Japan recognised at the time. Animal Crossing's Tom Nook is a tanuki running a property business on credit — the unpaid promissory note from the statue, turned into a game mechanic, and a much sharper joke than it appears.
Why do foxes and tanuki both shapeshift, and why are they so different about it?
Both animals live on the same boundary between village and mountain, and both were plausible culprits for anything odd at night, so both acquired transformation stories. The temperaments diverge along lines that track the animals reasonably well. The fox is solitary, sharp-featured, screams in the dark and is genuinely hard to catch — so its stories are about seduction, illusion and possession, and it is dangerous. The tanuki is stocky, blundering, easily trapped, plays dead badly and is frequently caught raiding a farm — so its stories are about botched disguises, unpaid bar tabs and pranks that rebound. Japanese folklore is often accused of arbitrariness in these assignments, and this is a case where the assignment is not arbitrary at all. The shapeshifter survey sets both against their counterparts elsewhere.
What does the tanuki transform into?
Objects and people in roughly equal measure, and the object transformations are the distinctive ones. Kettles, sake bottles, stones, the moon, whole buildings, a bridge that is not there, an inn that vanishes at dawn — the tanuki specialises in scenery rather than in bodies, and travellers in the tales are typically fooled into walking in circles all night or paying for a meal with leaves that turn back into leaves. Where it takes human form it tends towards monks and old men and is usually given away by the tail. The single exception to the comedy is bake-danuki in their large-scale form, which in a few Edo accounts appear as vast shapes filling a night sky, and which are not funny at all.