Tanuki

Tanuki (狸, たぬき) is the Japanese raccoon dog, Nyctereutes viverrinus, a wild member of the dog family found only in Japan, and the name of the shapeshifting trickster it became in folklore. It is not a raccoon. Tanuki have lived inside Tokyo’s Imperial Palace grounds since the mid-1990s, and in 2016 Emperor Akihito co-authored a study of their diet.

A Shadow by the Vending Machine

The first tanuki I ever saw was not in a forest. It was in Tokyo, a little after midnight, in a lane of old wooden houses where a vending machine hummed under a persimmon tree.

Something low and round slipped out of the shadow: a dark mask, short black legs, a coat so thick it looked inflated. It considered me without fear, then trotted off toward the shrine at the end of the street as if it had an appointment.

My first thought was raccoon. My second was the fat clay figure with the straw hat and the sake flask that stands outside half the noodle shops in Japan. Both thoughts were partly wrong, and the gap between them is the whole story of the tanuki.

Few creatures manage to be a wild neighbour, a trickster, a lucky charm and a video game power-up all at once. The tanuki does it without trying.

Tanuki Meaning: The Word and the Kanji

Say it tah-noo-kee, three even syllables. The word names the animal first, and the folklore grew on top of it.

The kanji 狸 joins the animal radical 犭, a squeezed form of 犬, the kanji for dog, with 里, which supplies the sound. In China the character named wildcats and other cat-sized animals. Japan had no wildcat to match, so early writers pinned 狸 on several creatures at once, the raccoon dog, the badger and even feral cats among them. Old texts still blur the tanuki with the mujina (狢), a name that in many regions also meant the badger.

The word lives on in everyday Japanese. 狸寝入り (tanuki-neiri), “tanuki sleep,” means pretending to be asleep. 狸親父 (tanuki oyaji) is a cunning old man, and so is 狸爺 (tanuki jijii), which borrows 爺, the informal character in the word for grandpa in Japanese. Shopkeepers like a pun as well: tanuki sounds like ta wo nuku (他を抜く), “to pull ahead of the others,” one reason a clay tanuki by the door is thought to be good for business.

The Real Tanuki: Japan’s Raccoon Dog

A tanuki is a canid, a member of the dog family alongside wolves and foxes. It is neither a raccoon, from a separate American family, nor a badger, a weasel relative.

Zoologists still argue about what to call it. Japan’s tanuki have 38 chromosomes and mainland raccoon dogs 54, not counting a few small extra ones in each, a gap wide enough that some authorities now list the Japanese animal as its own species, Nyctereutes viverrinus. Others keep it as a subspecies of the common raccoon dog.

The hondo tanuki (ホンドタヌキ) lives on Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Sado, and Hokkaido has its own form, the ezo tanuki (エゾタヌキ). A hondo tanuki measures 50 to 68 centimetres in the body, with a bushy tail of 13 to 20, and usually weighs 3 to 5 kilograms. By late autumn, fattened for winter, some reach 6 to 10.

Its habits explain a surprising amount of the folklore.

• It eats almost anything. Fruit, seeds, insects, frogs, crabs, mice and, near people, leftovers. It even climbs trees for persimmons, a rare skill in the dog family.
• It keeps a shared toilet. A family uses one latrine, a tamefun (溜め糞) about a metre square, which seems to work as a scent noticeboard.
• It lives in pairs or small families. Litters average four to six cubs.
• It sleeps through hard winters. In the colder north it dens up without truly hibernating, a winter sleep no other canid shares.
• It plays dead. Startled suddenly, a tanuki can go limp, then get up and trot away. That is where tanuki-neiri comes from, and, the Nipponica encyclopedia suggests, part of its reputation for fooling people.

Its hair still goes into calligraphy brushes. The mainland raccoon dog, introduced to Europe for its fur, has spread across much of the continent’s north and west as an invasive species. In Japan it shares the woods and field edges with the sika deer, wild boar and macaques in our guide to Japan’s native animals.

Tanuki, Raccoon or Badger?

Japan now has all three, which does not help. Raccoons, kept as pets, went wild, and the Ministry of the Environment lists them as an invasive alien species.

The Tanuki of Tokyo

That midnight tanuki was no fluke. Tanuki were still caught in the Tokyo area in the 1950s, were pushed to the western edge of the metropolis by the 1970s as the city spread, and have since come back.

The best-studied population lives in the Imperial Palace. Guards began reporting tanuki there in the mid-1990s, and surveys from 1996 to 2000 found they had settled. The 2016 paper co-written by Emperor Akihito and published by the National Museum of Nature and Science analysed 163 droppings from five years of weekly surveys and found the seeds of 95 plant taxa. The palace tanuki follow the fruiting calendar month by month, and in the lean weeks of March and April they turn to ginkgo nuts and acorns.

Bake-danuki: The Tanuki of Folklore

In folklore a tanuki that lives long enough becomes a bake-danuki (化け狸), a “changing tanuki,” with the power to bakasu (化かす), to bewitch.

The tools of the trade are famous. A tanuki sets a leaf on its head before it transforms. It drums on its swollen belly, the hara-tsuzumi (腹鼓), and in old Edo people blamed tanuki for the ghostly drumming heard after midnight, the tanuki-bayashi (狸囃子), counted among the “seven wonders” of the city’s neighbourhoods.

Tanuki turn into monks, strangers on the road, other yokai such as the faceless nopperabo (のっぺらぼう), even a teakettle. An old proverb, kitsune nanabake, tanuki yabake (狐七化け狸八化け), gives the fox seven disguises and the tanuki eight. The difference is motive. A kitsune, the fox spirit, changes shape to seduce, punish or serve. The tanuki mostly does it to make a fool of someone, and for the fun of it.

The monk disguise is the classic. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds an early nineteenth-century netsuke, a tiny carved toggle, of a tanuki in a priest’s robes. A legend of Kamakura’s Kencho-ji (建長寺) tells of a tanuki that went about preaching as a monk until a dog saw through it. Another tell: a disguised tanuki can answer a call only once, hitokoe orabi (一声おらび).

Tanuki could also possess people. In tanuki-tsuki (狸憑き), the victim eats enormously, the belly swells and the body wastes away; on Sado a yamabushi (山伏), a mountain ascetic, was called to drive it out. The tanuki serves no deity the way the fox serves Inari, but a few famous individuals became deities themselves, among them Danzaburo (団三郎) of Sado and Tasaburo (太三郎) of Yashima.

Famous Tanuki Legends

Bunbuku Chagama: The Kettle That Never Ran Dry

The best-loved tanuki story belongs to Morin-ji (茂林寺), a Soto Zen temple in Tatebayashi, Gunma. In its legend a monk named Shukaku (守鶴) served seven generations of abbots and kept a tea kettle that never ran dry. Shukaku was an old tanuki. The kettle is the Bunbuku Chagama (分福茶釜), “the kettle that shares good fortune,” and the temple still shows one to visitors.

The folktale children learn is livelier. A temple kettle sprouts a head, a tail and legs when set over the fire, is sold off to a junk dealer, and makes the man rich by walking a tightrope in a travelling show. The iron kettle it imitated still murmurs over the charcoal in a Japanese tea ceremony.

The Awa Tanuki War

Shikoku tells the tanuki’s epic. In the Tenpo era, 1830 to 1844, in what is now Komatsushima in Tokushima Prefecture, a dyer named Moemon (茂右衛門) saved a tanuki called Kincho (金長). Kincho trained under Rokuemon (六右衛門), the tanuki general of nearby Tsuda, and when he refused to stay, Rokuemon attacked by night.

In the best-known telling, more than 600 tanuki fought on each side of the Katsuura River for three days and three nights. Rokuemon fell, and Kincho died of his wounds. Moemon, a real person, enshrined him as a deity. When a 1939 film of the legend became a hit, a Kincho shrine was built on Mount Himi that May, and Komatsushima still has its Kincho Jinja (金長神社).

Kachi-kachi Yama: The Dark One

Not every tanuki is lovable. In Kachi-kachi Yama (かちかち山), a tanuki tied up by a farmer talks his wife into freeing it, kills her, and in the grimmer versions serves her to the farmer as soup. A neighbouring rabbit takes revenge in stages, setting fire to the firewood on the tanuki’s back, then racing it across a lake, the rabbit in a wooden boat and the tanuki in a mud one that dissolves. Above Lake Kawaguchiko, near Mount Fuji, a ropeway still carries visitors up a “Mount Kachi Kachi” dotted with scenes from the tale.

The Shigaraki Tanuki and Its Eight Lucky Traits

The clay tanuki outside noodle shops, bars and front doors across Japan comes from Shigaraki (信楽), a pottery town in Koka City, Shiga Prefecture, and one of the Six Ancient Kilns of Japan. Its standard pose is thought to copy a familiar Edo-period sight, the young acolyte sent out to buy sake: a straw hat, a sake flask in one hand and a shop passbook in the other.

The potter most credited with it is Fujiwara Tetsuzo (藤原銕造, 1876 to 1966), whose studio, Rian, moved from Kyoto to Shigaraki in the 1930s. The figure went national on 15 November 1951, when Emperor Showa visited Shigaraki and townspeople lined his route with tanuki holding little Japanese flags. His poem about them made the newspapers and now stands on a monument at Shigaraki Ichinomiya Shingu Shrine.

In 1952 a Tendai monk named Ishida Gocho (石田豪澄), nicknamed the “Tanuki Monk,” gave each part of the figure a lesson. The set is called hasso engi (八相縁起), the eight auspicious features.

1. The hat (kasa, 笠): be ready for trouble you cannot see coming.
2. Big eyes: look around and judge rightly.
3. The smile: be friendly, which is good for business.
4. The sake flask (tokkuri, 徳利): virtue, and never going short of food and drink.
5. The passbook (kayoi-cho, 通い帳): trust comes first.
6. The big belly: calm, bold decisions.
7. The money bag (kinbukuro, 金袋): luck with money.
8. The thick tail: see things through to a good end.

A tanuki 5.3 metres tall has stood outside Shigaraki Station since 1987, changing costume about six times a year. The town’s yuru-chara mascot, Ponpoko-chan, is a young tanuki, and the local tourism association has registered 8 November as Shigaraki Tanuki Day, for the eight.

The Tanuki’s Scrotum, Briefly

Trait seven needs a plain label, because the money bag is not really a bag. Edo-period pictures and stories gave the folkloric tanuki an enormous, stretchable scrotum, and a saying, tanuki no kintama hachijo-jiki (狸の金玉八畳敷き), claims it can cover eight tatami mats. One common explanation ties the joke to goldbeaters, said to wrap gold in tanuki skin while hammering it into leaf, with a pun on kin (金), gold.

It is folklore about luck, not anatomy. On the Shigaraki figure it became a wish for wealth, and it survives in a playground song, Tan Tan Tanuki, sung to the tune of the hymn “Shall We Gather at the River?”

Kitsune vs Tanuki

Japan’s two great shapeshifters are always paired, and the contrast is the point. The fox is elegant and uncanny, a messenger of Inari with a streak of real menace. The tanuki is round, comic and a little foolish, more prankster than threat.

Even their noodles differ. Kitsune udon wears the fox’s favourite, sweet fried tofu, while Tokyo’s tanuki soba comes scattered with tenkasu (天かす), crumbs of fried tempura batter.

With the two-tailed cat nekomata they make the classic trio of shapeshifters in our field guide to Japanese yokai.

Tanuki in Pop Culture

Pom Poko (平成狸合戦ぽんぽこ, Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko), written and directed by Isao Takahata for Studio Ghibli and released on 16 July 1994, follows tanuki fighting the construction of a new town in the Tama Hills on Tokyo’s western edge. They stage a giant ghost parade and send to Shikoku for three elders, one of them the sixth Kincho of the Awa war. It was the highest-earning Japanese film of 1994 at home, and it finds room for a cameo by Kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman.

Mario wore one. In Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), a leaf gives Mario a tail, and the Tanooki Suit turns him into a stone statue, a disguise any bake-danuki would admire.

Animal Crossing built a shopkeeper from one. Tom Nook, in the series since 2001, is a tanuki called Tanukichi (たぬきち) in Japan, as are his nephews Timmy and Tommy. The English versions call them raccoons.

Sources and Further Reading

• Long-term Trends in Food Habits of the Raccoon Dog in the Imperial Palace, Tokyo, Akihito et al., National Museum of Nature and Science (2016) the palace population since the 1990s, 163 droppings, 95 seed taxa, the Tokyo retreat and return
• The chromosome-scale genome of the raccoon dog, Lan et al., iScience (2022) 38 versus 54 chromosomes, the species debate, winter sleep, invasive in Europe
• タヌキ, Nipponica encyclopedia (Shogakukan), Kotobank range, size, latrines, death-feigning, possession, the Kencho-ji monk
• Netsuke of a tanuki in a priest's robes, Victoria and Albert Museum the monk disguise, early 19th century
• Shigaraki Destination Guide, Shigaraki Tourism Association the 1951 imperial visit, Ishida Gocho's eight features of 1952, the station tanuki
• Pom Poko, Studio Ghibli Takahata, released 16 July 1994

FAQ

Is a tanuki a raccoon?

No. A tanuki is a raccoon dog, a member of the dog family related to wolves and foxes, while raccoons belong to a separate American family. Both have a dark eye mask, but the tanuki has a short, unringed tail and walks on its toes like a dog.

Are tanuki real animals?

Yes. The tanuki is the Japanese raccoon dog, a wild canid of Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Sado, with a related form on Hokkaido. It even lives in cities, including the grounds of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace.

What is a tanuki in Japanese mythology?

In Japanese folklore the tanuki is a bake-danuki (化け狸), a shapeshifting yokai that puts a leaf on its head to transform, drums on its belly and tricks people, usually for fun rather than harm. Its famous stories include Bunbuku Chagama and the Awa Tanuki War.

Why do tanuki put a leaf on their head?

In folklore the leaf is how a tanuki transforms: it sets a leaf on its head and becomes a monk, a stranger or a teakettle. In Super Mario Bros. 3, a leaf is still what gives Mario his tail.

Why do tanuki statues have a large scrotum?

It is an Edo-period folklore joke, tied to the saying that a tanuki’s scrotum could cover eight tatami mats and to a pun on kin, gold. On Shigaraki statues it is one of the eight lucky features and stands for luck with money.

What is the difference between a tanuki and a kitsune?

Both are shapeshifting animals of Japanese folklore. The kitsune is a fox: elegant, uncanny, a messenger of the deity Inari and sometimes dangerous. The tanuki is a raccoon dog: round, comic and usually harmless, a prankster at heart.