Tanuki: The Magical Canine with Gigantic Balls

The fox and tanuki seem quite similar at first glance. They’re both smallish, wild canines native to Japan that play a prominent role in the country’s folklore. In real life, both are adaptable and successful over a wide range of habitats, including cities. In folklore, they both have shapeshifting powers which they use to deceive people. They can even be spoken of as a kind of unit using the word kori (狐狸), made up of the kanji for tanuki (狸) and kitsune (狐).

Although they’re relatives, the two also have many differences. The fox is familiar pretty much throughout the world and appears in the mythology of many countries. But the tanuki is a character unique to Japan. Westerners who first encountered the tanuki and its folklore totally mangled the translation of its name and, to this day, most Americans have never heard of it.

Delve into the stories and you’ll discover that the two canines have very different personalities. While the kitsune has maintained an aura of danger and awe, the magical tanuki has developed into a guy you’d enjoy having a cup of sake with. He’s a mischief-maker and prankster, down-to-earth and downright bawdy – so don’t say I didn’t warn you, when we get to the part about his magical balls.

Tanuki Shapeshifting

tanuki-shapeshifting-balls

Both the fox and the tanuki can fool you into thinking they’re human, but each have a different favorite disguise. Yeah, there are stories of tanuki doing the classic kitsune illusion, pretending they’re a beautiful woman and seducing a man who wakes up the next morning in a pile of leaves in the middle of the woods, instead of the luxurious bedroom he thought he fell asleep in the previous night. But their favorite disguise is that of a Buddhist monk, so much so that there’s a name for the tanuki disguised this way: tanuki-bōzu.

Like the kitsune’s connection with the sacred fox of Shinto, an association with Buddhism runs through the tanuki folklore. But his relationship to the religion is quite different – more a kind of sardonic commentary. When tanuki-bōzu is seen in art, he’s always well-nourished and comfortable-looking – no Zen asceticism for this guy.

Tanuki enjoy gathering together to imitate human activities, including Buddhist rituals like funerals, assembling at gravesides at night with lanterns and imitating chants. Tanuki-bōzu even imitate that most human of activities, writing. As Zack Davisson translates one of these tales:

The tanuki claimed to be a monk from the Murasaki Otoku temple in Kyoto, and was under a vow of silence so could only communicate by written notes.

Now, the handwriting of this monk was most peculiar. He freely mixed the styles of artful Chinese calligraphy and machine-printed Japanese with some strange flourishes that Heigo had never seen before. There were many grammatical mistakes as well, and Heigo thought it looked like the sort of thing that a tanuki would write.

There are many such stories of tanuki writings that have been passed down through the years.

The tanuki seem to enjoy imitating the self-important figures of human society in general. They’re also said to impersonate government officials and knock on your door, harrassing people into pay your taxes, or accuse them of some imaginary infraction of the law. If you suspect you’re being pestered by a tanuki in disguise, the clues will be the same as for kitsune: they may be somewhat luminous when shapeshifted. If it rains, their kimono will stay dry. If it’s not dark out or raining, your best bet is to hope the tanuki loses focus on maintaining their illusion and lets their tail pops out.

More Tanuki Trickery

Hokusai-tanuki-teapot

Tanuki love to shapeshift into objects as well as humans. They can disguise themselves as trees, stone lanterns, and even the moon (the latter is the most fun when the moon is out and the tanuki make people think they’ve gone crazy).

The classic tale of tanuki-as-object is Bunbuku Chagama. There are many variations but here’s one version:

A farmer rescues a tanuki from a trap and, in gratitude, it transforms into a teapot that he can sell to get money as a thanks for the favor. When the buyer uses his new purchase, the tanuki can’t stand the heat, so the kettle sprouts a head and legs and tail and runs away. That last irresistible image is often depicted in works of art like prints and netsuke.

Tanuki also enjoy making noise – some of which doesn’t involve any magic. They frighten people at night by throwing stones at their house, dropping a bucket loudly into a well, and clattering pots and pans. Throwing a continuous rain of pebbles onto the roof of a house is another favorite. They’re perhaps most famous for drumming on their big bellies, which they can use to draw people off the beaten path until they’re lost.

They can also imitate sounds – making people think they’re hearing thunder and lightning, for example. This tanuki love of mimicry turned perilous as Japan opened to the West in the late nineteenth century and started to develop technologically. In one example, a train conductor hears a train whistle and the “shu shu po po po” sound of another steam engine coming straight towards him. In those early days there was just one track shared by trains going in both directions, so the conductor stops in a panic to avoid a collision, but no train ever arrives. It happens again and again till one night, when he decides to keep going, and nothing happens. The next morning, the conductor finds a dead tanuki on the tracks. “Well, of course, it was just that tanuki really enjoy imitating things,” the narrator concludes.

Some see this tale as an allegory of the clash between the new and the traditional, and between foreign introductions and native Japanese culture, since the train was a powerful symbol of Westernization. On the other hand, real dead tanuki were found on train tracks all the time, so who’s to say it was only a legend?

Tanuki Illusions

tanuki-playing-tricks

Tanuki not only make themselves look like something else, they can produce other illusions as well. They’ll often buy things with money that later, after they’re long gone, turns to leaves. They can make people see entirely different landscapes, making them get lost even in familiar territory. They can make will o’ the wisp fire, like kitsune, and use it to prank people – in the old days before artificial light, this was a good way to fool a farmer into thinking he was having a whole conversation with a fellow smoking a pipe in the dark. And they think it’s a hoot to make fisherman’s nets feel heavy with fish and watch as they pull up empty nets.

Tanuki can also get kind of meta about this stuff. There’s one legend of a tanuki who fools a man into thinking he’s watching a tanuki transformed into a shamisen player. Just as the shamisen player is about to reveal the secret to the gathered crowd, the man discovers he’s actually looking at the ass of a horse.

In a story by the renowned Meiji-era novelist Natsume Sōseki, a character is reading a book written by a tanuki that bemoans the fact that people have such contempt for his species, while there is “such a commotion about Western this and Western that.” Why make such a big deal out of this new Western import, hypnotism, he laments, when tanuki have been doing the same thing all along?

Tanuki Balls

tanuki-balls-testicles-nuts

The legendary tanuki clearly has a lot of interesting characteristics, but there’s no doubt which is the most strange and unique: his magical expanding scrotum.

Yes, really. It’s said that the tanuki can stretch his ballsack to the size of eight tatami mats. Of course it’s more flexible than tatami, so it’s way more useful. Tanuki are depicted using their nutbags as sails for boats, fishing nets, umbrellas, swimming pools, cloaks to smother an enemy… ”

Depicted” seems to be the important word here – the amazing scrotum is big in art, but not so much in the stories. It’s a later addition to the tanuki’s repertoire and seems to have really taken off in the Edo period when ukiyo-e artists went wild illustrating it. Zack Davisson, who’s read lots of Edo-period stories about tanuki, says they mostly focus on their shapeshifting or belly-drumming, not the magical scrotum. The ballsack seems to make a better visual than a plot element.

How did tanuki come by this unique magic? It’s got nothing to do with sexual prowess, which is never a feature of tanuki legends. The generally accepted explanation is a lot less fun for the tanuki. In the old days, metal workers would wrap gold in the skin of tanuki when making gold leaf. You want to hammer your gold to the thinnest sheet possible, so you need a skin that can stretch a long way without breaking, and it was said that a tanuki skin could reach the size of eight tatami.

What really clinched it, though, was probably the pun: kin no tama “small ball of gold” and kintama, slang for testicles. Tanuki scrotums began to be sold as wallets and lucky charms, said to stretch your money the way they stretched the gold.

It’s worth mentioning here that Japanese culture is a lot less uptight about this sort of body-part humor than the West – for example there’s a traditional children’s song about it, which begins:

Tan Tan Tanuki no kintama wa,
Kaze mo nai no ni,
Bura bura

“Tan-tan-tanuki’s balls, even if the wind isn’t blowing, swing, swing.”

(Wikipedia claims that the tune this is sung to is the same as the gospel song “Shall we gather at the river?” which is just too mind-boggling to fact-check.)

Finally, while I’ve always wondered what the female tanuki’s take on all this is, I’ve been unable to dig anything up on the subject. Even if the legendary size of their sack gave them some advantage in the sack, they seem far too busy creating sails and nets and carpets to tend to the ladies. I’m still looking for an ukiyo-e print with a female tanuki standing off to the side rolling her eyes at the foolishness. In any case, it’s pretty clear that, if you’re female and want to be a Japanese mythical canine, you’d be better off sticking to the fox side. When it comes to tanuki, males get to have all the really wacky fun.

The Tanuki Adapts to Modern Times

tanuki-statues-at-shigaraki

Photo by jpellgen

Though tanuki are pranksters and, in the older stories, even frightening, they’ve always had a good side – or at least, like most magical animals, if you scratch their back they’ll scratch yours. There are stories like the Bunbuku Chagama where the farmer who helps the tanuki is rewarded. There’s another story where a homeowner was awoken by strange noises to find a family of tanuki devouring the remains of a feast. He took pity on them and started leaving food out every night. One night, burglars broke in, and two gigantic wrestlers appeared to drive them away. The family bowed in thanks and when they stood up, their rescuers had vanished. Later the tanuki appeared in a dream and explained that the wrestlers had been them in disguise.

(By the way, if you want to get tanuki on your side by feeding them, they are said to love fish and “parched beans.” The dish called tanuki soba or udon isn’t called that because they have a taste for it – it’s probably because the crunchy batter bits sprinkled on top don’t contain anything, so are kind of an tempura illusion.)

Nowadays, the most common manifestation of the tanuki is entirely positive – it’s that cute, big-eyed statue of a tanuki with a big belly and a straw hat that you see outside of shops and restaurants. I was surprised to discover that this is not only a 20th-century development, it’s generally attributed to one person: Fujiwara Tetsuzō, a potter of Shigaraki-yaki, a type of ceramics made in Shiga Prefecture. This is where most mass-produced tanuki statues come from (including more and more strange ones catering to modern tastes – tanuki baseball player with huge balls, anyone?)

The story goes that Emperor Hirohito made a visit to the town of Koga, the center of ceramic production in Shiga, in 1951, and the street was lined with flag-waving tanuki statues to honor him. He was so tickled that he wrote a poem about it, and the statues took off in popularity after this celebrity endorsement. This modern tanuki represented in the statue is said to be a symbol of eight rather boring virtues and is a kind of commercial good-luck figure. Kind of sad that a creature who could once fool people into thinking it was an entire train, battling the forces of modernity and change, is reduced to shilling sake and attracting restaurant customers, but I guess we all have to adapt to the times. The train always won in those stories, after all.

The Real-Life Tanuki

real-life-tanuki

Photo by rumpleteaser

Those 20th-century developments brought us a very long way from the real wild animal. The famous tanuki statue doesn’t really look much like a real tanuki, as often happens when animals get transformed into folkloric characters – a teddy bear doesn’t look much like a grizzly, either. In fact those statues look more like a teddy bear, with the notable exception of their gargantuan testicles, which is not usually a feature of Western children’s toys.

In real life, tanuki have much pointier snouts and look more like very fluffy brown foxes than teddy bears. Their fluffy coat is one of the reasons they’re quite widely distributed these days. Tanuki are originally native to the far East, from China, Japan, Korea to Mongolia and the far southeast of Russia. But beginning in the 1930s, Russians introduced them into the wild so they could be hunted for their fur, and now they’re found all over Europe. By 2005 they were sighted in northern Italy, showing that tanuki had managed to cross the Alps, and in some places, like Finland, they’re now the most common medium-sized carnivore. Their fur is still used commercially, including in Japan, where it’s used for calligraphy brushes.

The tanuki was so successful when introduced to new places because it’s very adaptable. It can survive far north because it’s the only canid that can hibernate. They have a varied diet, eating anything they can catch as well as non-meat items like berries. They can travel a long way looking for a suitable habitat, and have larger litters than similar sized carnivores – up to 8-10 pups at a time. Although they’re clearly invasive by definition, scientists have found little evidence that they have a negative impact on native fauna, although they can carry diseases and some nasty parasites.

Tanuki are so adaptable that they can also live in cities, which are actually better for them in some ways than rural areas – less competition from stray dogs, and way more of the human leftovers that are appealing to their omnivorous nature. In fact it’s estimated that about a thousand of them live in Tokyo. Some live in relatively foresty bits of the city – they’re often sighted around Meiji Jingu shrine and are reported to live in the Imperial Palace grounds. But they’re also seen in totally unnatural areas, like this one on the subway and this one that was running around in Akihabara. My favorite story is the tanuki a couple of years ago that strolled into a ballet studio in Ebisu, aided by an automatic door.

The woman at the reception of the ballet class said, “The automatic door in front of me opened, even though there was no sign of anyone passing by. I thought it was strange, then I heard a scream, and when I went into the back classroom, I was surprised to see a raccoon dog. “

Three police officers responded and, by the time they arrived, the tanuki had apparently had second thoughts about the prospect of studying dance, since it reportedly “calmly approached the net that the police officer was holding”.

What Isn’t a Tanuki?

ninja-shinobi-tanuki

Photo by rumpleteaser

As Westerners started to write about Japan when the country first opened to the outside world in the nineteenth century, there was no English word for tanuki. So the situation began in confusion, and has stayed that way to this day. Scholars writing about the folklore called it a badger, which seems pretty inexcusable since the animals aren’t even vaguely related and their only real similarity is that they have black marks on their face. By that token, they could just as well have called it a kind of panda. They also seem to have ignored the fact that the word for “badger” is actually anaguma. Really, people, is it so hard to get these things right?

To be fair, though, they were probably confused by the fact that there was ambiguity in the traditional Japanese nomenclature for various unrelated creatures. The tanuki had other local names including mujina and mami. The word mujina was also used to refer to all kinds of medium-sized wild mammals including the badger. Apparently some people even took advantage of this, as is written about on the excellent set of pages about tanuki at the website Onmark Productions:

This confusion is sometimes the source of great amusement. In Tochigi Prefecture, for example, the Tanuki is called “Mujina.” In 1924, in the so-called Tanuki-Mujina Incident たぬき・むじな事件, Tochigi authorities prohibited the hunting of Tanuki and promptly arrested one hunter — who claimed he was out hunting mujina. The man was taken to trial, but eventually acquitted (on 9 June 1925). His defense argued that hunting of “mujina” was not prohibited by law, that the hunter’s intention was to pursue mujina, and therefore, by law, he was not guilty of any offense.

In English the real animal is now generally called “raccoon-dog”. But if you read 20th-century English writings on folklore, you’ll still see tanuki referred to as “badgers” (as you’ll see in the references list to this article).

Sadly, in the one big chance tanuki had to be introduced to American audiences, it was mixed up with another animal instead. The Studio Ghibli movie, released in English under the title Pom Poko, is about tanuki in suburban Tokyo trying to save their habitat from developers. As I’ve ranted about elsewhere, in the English version of the movie the tanuki were called raccoons – not raccoon-dogs, but raccoons, another medium-sized, unrelated mammal from another part of the world entirely with black markings on its face. SIGH. The substitution no doubt seemed like an easy out since, as cartoon characters at least, both animals are conventionally chubby, masked, and have similar rascally personalities. I guess they hoped kids wouldn’t be able to figure out what was going on in those magical-ballsack scenes, something that is not a feature of raccoon lore in the West.

Personally, I don’t get it. I’ll bet when the movie Madagascar came out, there were a lot of kids who didn’t know what a lemur was, but it didn’t cause, like, widespread childhood trauma. But maybe the tanuki are okay with this. Maybe they like being translated incorrectly – it’s another kind of shapeshifting, after all, and maybe it’s nice to be able to remain a bit mysterious at least in some parts of the world, instead of being forced to stand in front of shops smiling and wearing a straw hat.

Tanuki Today

tanuki-subway

Photo by Joey Rozier

The tanuki still play a very lively role in Japanese culture. Once you start looking for tanuki in Japan, you’ll see representations of them everywhere, even aside from the ubiquitous statues. I particularly love the informational stickers on the Tokyo metro, like the one above. The tanuki is mascot for many companies, playing his cute commercial good-luck role, such as on the Lawson convenience store points card and as the symbol of the hip Hachijoji neighbohoood of Tokyo.

tanuki-statues

Photo by Linda Lombardi

If you want to have a more old-school tanuki encounter, though, you can do that when you visit a couple of major tourist attractions in Tokyo. There’s a shrine to tanuki in Akihabara that goes back to the late 17th century, and there’s Chingodo Shrine at Sensoji Temple in Asakusa, which has got a couple of big tanuki statues and puts on a festival every year on March 17th. There seem to be conflicting stories about the origin of Chingodo Shrine. The story on the temple’s website is that, in the late 19th century, it came to the head priest of Sensoji in a dream that the tanuki living in the garden of his official residence were its guardians, and so a shrine was built to honor them. The English sign at the shrine itself, though, says that the deity was enshrined “to prevent mischief by raccoon dogs that had taken up residence.”

Either way, sounds like a good deal for the tanuki… Since there was a dream involved, I’ve got a pretty good idea of where it came from.