Tanuki / Bake-danuki

The fox's comic rival.

There's a proverb: "the fox has seven disguises, the tanuki has eight."

And the difference is in the purpose. The fox transforms to tempt — it becomes a beautiful woman, marries you, and the story ends in loss.

The tanuki transforms to fool.

Mischief without malice, mostly. Phantom music. Teapots that sprout legs. And a body of named, individually enshrined tanuki that no other creature in Japan can match.

It's in the oldest books

The Nihon Shoki — the official chronicle, 720 — records, in Empress Suiko's chapter, that tanuki "turn into humans and sing songs."

That's the founding attestation, and it's a wonderful one. The very first thing Japan wrote down about this animal is that it does impressions and performs.

The drumming

Tanuki-bayashi — phantom drum-and-flute music heard at night, from nowhere.

You're in a village, or a temple compound, and there's music. Festival music. Somewhere. And there's no festival, and you never find the players.

The tanuki is drumming on its own belly — hara-tsuzumi — and the sound carries.

It pairs with the tengu's mountain music. Between them, a great deal of the unexplained sound of rural Japanese nights had a name and a culprit.

The famous body is Edo comedy, not folklore

Worth being clear about, because it's the first thing anyone notices.

The enormous belly and the famously vast scrotum are Edo-period visual comedy. Kuniyoshi's prints stretch the latter into boats, fishing nets, shop-signs, and umbrellas.

It's iconography. It is not early folklore.

And the Shigaraki ceramic tanuki — the one outside every restaurant, with the straw hat and the sake bottle and the ledger — has eight lucky traits associated with it: the hat, the eyes, the smile, the bottle, the promissory note, the belly, the scrotum, the tail.

Those eight traits were invented in 1952.

Folklore is still being manufactured, on the record, within living memory.

The named ones

This is the tanuki's real distinction: it produces individuals — with names, biographies, shrines, and rites.

Bunbuku Chagama — the tanuki that became a tea kettle, bolted from the fire on sprouted legs, walked a tightrope for a poor peddler, and retired to Morin-ji temple, where a kettle is displayed today.

Danzaburou-danuki of Sado — boss of the island, who by tradition kept the foxes out.

Shibaemon-tanuki of Awaji — who loved kabuki, paid for his tickets in transformed leaves, was killed by theatre dogs, and was then enshrined by the theatre when attendance collapsed.

Inugami Gyōbu of Matsuyama — commander of 808 tanuki in the great disturbance.

Kinchō, Rokuemon, Yashima no Hage-tanuki — the Shikoku cluster. Named, enshrined, given rituals.

And in Kachi-kachi Yama, the tanuki is the villain — it kills an old woman, and a rabbit takes a genuinely horrifying revenge involving a burning load of firewood and a boat made of mud.

Which is a useful corrective. The trickster wasn't always lovable.

Shikoku is tanuki country

Every province on the island has enshrined tanuki. Tokushima, Kagawa, Ehime.

And the folk explanation is straightforwardly ecological: there are few foxes on Shikoku.

So the tanuki fills the fox's entire niche in local belief — possession, wealth, trickery, shrines, the lot.

Sado's Danzaburou tradition says the same thing from the other side: the boss tanuki kept the foxes off.

Islands pick one trickster, and then that one does all the jobs.

And one of them became a nursery song

Shōjōji, in Kisarazu, has a temple-drumming legend.

In 1925 it was turned into a children's song by Noguchi Ujō and Nakayama Shimpei. Hirai Hideko's 1929 recording sold some 170,000 copies and kept selling into the 1960s.

And in 1955, Eartha Kitt recorded it — as "Sho-Jo-Ji" — and it went abroad.

A phantom-drumming tanuki legend from a temple in Chiba, turned into a nursery standard, and then into an American jazz single.

Every Japanese child can still sing it.