What Is a Tanuki? The Real Animal, the Shape-Shifter and the Statue

A glazed figure stands beside a restaurant door: round belly, straw hat, a sake flask in one hand. The animal behind it is something else, a stocky wild canid with a dark mask across its eyes. The figure is also younger than the tales told about it. One word covers three things that should be kept apart. There is a living creature, a shape-changer in old and regional stories, and a souvenir that spread across Japan in the twentieth century. This page separates them, and says plainly where the sources disagree.

The animal itself

The University of Michigan's Animal Diversity Web describes a small, stocky member of the dog family, about 50 to 68 centimeters from head to rump, with a white muzzle and black fur around the eyes. The face markings resemble a raccoon's. It does not bark. It whines, whimpers, mews or growls, and it is an opportunistic omnivore.

Naming is a trap too. Older English translators often called the animal a badger, which it is not. Keep that in mind when a translation says badger and the Japanese word is tanuki.

What the earliest record says

The first row is the earliest verified, and it is already a puzzle. W. G. Aston's English Nihongi of 1896 glosses the animal in a footnote as a kind of badger. A general survey of the creature in folklore renders the same line as a tanuki, and notes that the word mujina sometimes meant the raccoon dog as well. Morinji's own page says mujina and adds that some say tanuki. All three leave room for doubt. The entry is a single line in a list of the year's strange events. It does not describe a species.

The kettle, as the temple tells it

Morinji, a Soto Zen temple in Tatebayashi, keeps the best-known tale, and its official pages give the temple's version. The monk Shukaku came with the founder and served the abbots for generations. In 1570, when a gathering of a thousand people needed hot water, he fetched a kettle overnight that never ran dry, named it Bunbuku Chagama, and said that those who drank from it would receive eight blessings. Later, asleep, he grew fur on his hands and feet and a tail. He showed the people two scenes, a battle at Yashima and a sermon of the Buddha, and flew away on the 28th day of the second month of 1587, 161 years after he and the founder first built a small hermitage there.

The tale most people know is a different shape. The temple says the writer Iwaya Sazanami published it as a children's story, and that his picture of a tanuki putting its head, hands and feet out of the kettle to walk a tightrope became the popular image. The temple still honors Shukaku as a guardian in a hall of his own, and 21 tanuki statues line the approach. Visit it as a temple first.

Trickster, fool or lucky charm?

In tales the tanuki is often a fool. Ozaki's 1908 English retelling of a mountain tale has a mischievous badger take an old woman's shape to deceive her husband, until a rabbit's revenge ends it. A survey of the folklore reports a saying that the fox has seven disguises and the tanuki has eight, with the difference that the tanuki changes shape to trick people into looking silly, not to tempt them. Compare the Kitsune, who shapes herself into a wife, and the cat of Bakeneko.

The Japan Tourism Agency tells the other story. Shigaraki is one of Japan's Six Ancient Kilns, with pottery dating back more than 800 years. In the early 1950s the potter Fujiwara Tetsuzo made the first of these tanuki figures for the welcome of Emperor Showa. The best-known one wears a hat and holds a sake flask, and shop owners put it at the door because the word tanuki suggests the idea of surpassing others. Sources differ on details: one survey says Fujiwara settled in Shiga in 1936 and that a monk devised the figure's eight lucky traits in 1952. The sake flask is older than the figure. The Met holds an eighteenth-century ivory netsuke by an artist named Garaku, titled "Tanuki with a Sake Bottle and Bills for Sake."

How to separate animal, tale and souvenir

• If it forages, whines and does not bark, it is the animal, and the best source is a zoology page.
• If it changes shape or beats a drum in the night, it is a tale. Ask who wrote it and when.
• If it holds a flask and smiles at a shop door, it is the Shigaraki figure, which the Japan Tourism Agency dates to the early 1950s.
• If it comes from a temple, ask whether you are reading the temple's tradition or a later fairy tale.

Common mix-ups about the tanuki

• "It is a raccoon or a badger." It is a canid. "Badger" is an older translator's word.
• "The figure is ancient." The pottery tradition is old, but the Japan Tourism Agency dates the figures to the early 1950s.
• "The Nihon Shoki clearly describes a tanuki." The translation says badger, and others say tanuki. The chronicle itself records an omen.
• "There is one kettle story." The temple's version has a monk who shows himself to be a creature, and the popular fairy tale shows a creature in a kettle.