Danzaburou-danuki

Sado Island, off the coast of Niigata, has a great deal of tanuki folklore and — famously — no fox folklore at all.

That's a real and slightly odd fact about the island, and Sado has always known exactly who to credit for it.

He threw the fox in the sea

Danzaburou was the boss tanuki of Sado, and his founding achievement was keeping the foxes out permanently.

Foxes are the great con artists of Japanese folklore — shapeshifters, illusionists, possessors of households. Danzaburou beat them at their own game, at the crossing itself. In the best-known version he tricked a fox into transforming into a pair of sandals, wore it aboard the ferry, and threw it into the sea partway across.

No fox has risked the crossing since.

It's a wonderfully petty founding legend for an island, and it encodes something real: Japanese islands tend to pick one trickster. Where the tanuki is established, the fox is thin, and vice versa, and the local folklore usually has a story explaining the partition as a victory.

The wall, the palace, and the leaves

His working repertoire is standard great-tanuki business, executed at scale.

He put up invisible walls across night roads — the traveller walking along in the dark suddenly cannot go forward, cannot go around, and can feel nothing there. He ran a mirage palace at Shimoto in Aikawa, appearing as a magnificent estate to draw visitors inside. And he passed leaves gilded to look like coins, which is the single most reliable thing a Japanese shapeshifter does with money.

Which makes what he did next genuinely strange.

He ran a bank

Danzaburou lent money. Real money, to people in trouble, and the loan procedure is documented with a precision you almost never get in folklore.

You wrote out a contract: the amount you wanted, the date you would return it, your seal. You took it to his residence in Aikawa and left it there overnight.

By the next day the contract had gone, and the funds were there in its place.

A drop-box bank with no teller. Nobody ever saw him. You filed your paperwork, you came back, and the loan had been approved by something living under a rock.

And it worked well enough, and mattered enough to people, that Danzaburou was enshrined as a deity — Futatsuiwa Daimyōjin, with a shrine at Aikawa that is still there.

Read that arc again. A trickster who cons foxes and passes fake coins ends up running an informal rural credit facility, and is worshipped as a god for it. Of all the routes from monster to deity in this collection — pacification by ritual, by sword, by marriage — this is the only one that runs through financial services.

And underneath, a real man

There's a theory about where he came from that is uncomfortable in the best way.

The suggestion is that Danzaburou began as a real Echigo merchant who, in 1657, sold young tanuki as breeding stock — for their skins, which were used to make the leather bellows at the Sado gold mines.

The Sado mines were a brutal place. They consumed labour, and they consumed the island.

So on this reading, the god of Sado's tanuki started as a supplier to the industry that hollowed the island out, and was named for the animals he sold into it. The folklore turned a man who trafficked in tanuki hides into the tanuki chieftain who protects the island, gives loans to the poor, and keeps the foxes off the ferry.

Whether or not it's true, the shape of it is exactly how this tradition works. Real people, inside datable memory, composting into legend — and coming back up as something considerably kinder than they went in.