By Kathryn M. Tanaka, Associate Professor at the University of Hyogo

Featured image by Sam Nystrom Costales

Over the past few days, there have been a number of articles linking raccoon dogs in a live animal, or wet, market in Wuhan with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic.¹ The raccoon dogs at the heart of this media firestorm are not actually raccoons, but a relative of the dog that are native to China, Korea, Japan, and some parts of Siberia. Raccoon dogs, or in Japanese, tanuki, look more like a brown or black furred fox than a raccoon, although a face with eyes ringed in black gives it the English name “raccoon.” While the canid creature is common throughout these regions, the animal has a second existence as a bakemono, a Japanese supernatural being (yōkai) with transformative powers. As a yōkai with a rich history, raccoon dogs in the news beg a rethinking of what Japanese tanuki and their lore can tell us about the media today.

Foxes and tanuki have long been associated with using supernatural powers to shapeshift or otherwise confound and trouble the humans who live near them in Japanese folklore. While foxes might be the more well-known of the two, warnings against tanuki as magical tricksters go back to the eighth century,² and in the following centuries the creature became a staple of Japanese folklore in any number of different stories, tales which involve some kind of association with humans. In these tales, as Michael Dylan Foster points out, “the tanuki is a wild animal that occasionally makes mischievous forays into areas inhabited by humans.³ It is a beast of the borders, ecologically skirting the line between culture and nature. Folklorically, too, tanuki are commonly depicted as hedonistic, liminal creatures, simultaneously of this world and the other world.”⁴ They frequently transform into everyday objects or human beings; in addition to shapeshifting they can mimic noises, and they have the ability to change the landscape, rendering it unfamiliar and uncanny, causing people to lose their way. Some of Japan’s most beloved fairy tales feature the tanuki as a psychotic trickster, such as Kachi Kachi Yama (Kachi Kachi Mountain) or as a kind shapeshifter in Bunbuku Chagama (Bunbuku Teakettle).  

Popular tales featuring tanuki spread widely and became much more ubiquitous in Edo-period (1604-1868) popular fiction, with tanuki again often inhabiting the borders between human and yōkai, disguised as monks or beautiful women. Many tales were lighthearted and comedic, with the tanuki a bumbling protagonist or scapegoat, or a yōkai willing to help humans or other creatures. An example can be seen below from a play (jōruri), set in the world of yōkai and prominently featuring a tanuki, by popular writer Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848). In the image, a tanuki with an animal head and human body sits on a veranda, consulting with Rokurokubi, a long-necked female yōkai.⁵ The story, a humorous tale, involves the tanuki and other yōkai protecting Rokurokubi from an arranged marriage. In works such as this, the yōkai, including the tanuki, reflected concern about the social order or society. The tanuki was a figure that often offered humorous, sardonic, and sometimes critical commentary on human behavior. When they imitate Buddhist priests or government officials, their comedic behavior or tricks expose the foibles or self-importance of the ruling and religious classes.   

In popular fiction, tanuki impersonate human beings in what literary scholar Melek Ortabasi and folklorist Michael Dylan Foster both refer to as “haunting,” occupying liminal spaces between the human world and the supernatural, between the land farmed by people and the deep forests of the mountains. Like other animals, tanuki as yōkai challenge our boundaries of the self in a world made slightly uncanny. This has continued into the present; tanuki appear frequently in more modern Japanese literature, as well. Tanuki pop up in works by Kenji Miyazawa, Masamune Hakucho, Yoshio Toyoshima, Hirosuke Hamada, and Kotaro Tanaka, to name only a few writers who are inspired by the lore of the tanuki in their literature.⁶

Tanuki are not limited to stories or illustrations, however; we see tanuki in other media today as an ambiguous, liminal figure shifting between human and animal. There are songs about tanuki that are beloved by children or were even dance hits; there have been TV programs and other forms of entertainment that celebrate tanuki.⁷ But such depictions in contemporary pop culture are also often still rooted in lore. For example, in folklore, tanuki are sometimes depicted with leaves on their head as the source of their shapeshifting powers. In the popular video game franchise Super Mario Brothers, players can get Tanooki suits via a Super Leaf that gives the player the ability to fly for a short period, as well as the ability to transform into a statue.⁸ More recently, Tom Nook (named Tanukichi in the Japanese version) in Animal Crossing is also a tanuki, managing the town shop. In this game, as well, some characters view him with suspicion, wondering if he is human or raccoon.⁹ The suspicion of human-tanuki duality makes characters’ bodies ambiguous, and the boundaries between human and tanuki are fluid and uncertain in these video games.

Tanuki appear in film as well; for example, they famously take a stand against human development and environmental degradation in Ghibli’s 1994 film, Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko (Heisei-era Tanuki War Ponpoko, or Pom Poko in English), written and directed by the Studio’s co-founder Takahata Isao (1935-2018).¹⁰ In the movie, the tanuki first try to fight industrialization and environmental destruction in a variety of ways, ranging from yōkai parade to inflated testes-turned-pummels to eco-terrorism to public media appeals. The tanuki try everything, until they can no longer fight, with many of them killed or dying.¹¹ Those who are able transform into humans and assimilate into society as the foxes did before them; those who are unable to shapeshift either die or eke out an existence in parks and shrinking undeveloped areas. The film is a bold and eccentric comment on environmental destruction and the accompanying loss of (folkloric) culture through assimilation that comes with it. There is no happy ending. 

Tanuki using their testicles as parachutes and tactical weaponry to attack the police in the 1994 Studio Ghibli film, Pom Poko.¹²

Coupled with such beloved pop culture appearances, tanuki are also associated in folkloric tradition with wealth and good luck. This association is also in fact related to the reason why tanuki in popular culture today are often depicted with giant testicles– as can be seen above, Pom Poko draws deeply on this lore, as the tanuki use their testicles as mats, parachutes, weaponry, and more. Most scholars agree these giant testicles in tanuki depictions likely originated in the Kanazawa area, where goldsmiths would use tanuki testicles as part of the process of hammering gold nuggets into leaf sheets. Apparently, this particular part of the tanuki was the best to use to wrap the gold in to protect the metal as it was flattened. In Japanese, kintama, or gold balls, is also a way to refer to testicles, and creating a “golden balls” pun is a kind of humor we can share across cultures and historical periods.¹³ Because of this association with gold, and from there with wealth and luck, in Japan it is not unusual for a small ceramic statue of a tanuki in a straw hat, a sake bottle, a promissory note, and a giant belly sitting over equally enlarged testicles to be seen outside stores or in homes.¹⁴

In addition to associations with wealth and good luck, however, tanuki have a darker side. As a “beast of the borders,” the association of tanuki with pandemic illness is also not new. Illness, like yōkai, breaks down the barriers between humans and an invisible world, threatening our being. As in many places, illness in Japan has often been associated with the supernatural, but until recently tanuki have been most closely associated with cholera. In 1822, cholera first appeared in the Japanese archipelago, and several epidemics over the course of the nineteenth century made the disease a public health crisis that gained a tremendous amount of media and literary attention.¹⁵ One element of this popular discourse was the association of tanuki with the disease. This was in part because there were many words for cholera in Japanese in the Edo period (1604-1868),¹⁶ but one word used frequently was korori (the literal meaning is to die suddenly). This word was rendered into Japanese using Chinese characters for ko-rō-ri (狐狼狸), literally meaning fox-wolf-tanuki. This may be because in Japanese folklore, foxes and tanuki are both known as shapeshifting tricksters that can cause a variety of ailments, both physical and mental.¹⁷ Indeed, in the case of an 1858 cholera epidemic, Bettina Gramlich-Oka noted there were rumors the cholera epidemic was caused by a fox, and the characters used for the illness reinforced the invented linkages.¹⁸ 

Another way of writing korori used the characters for tiger, wolf, and diarrhea, also associating the illness with these things. These connections between tanuki, foxes, and illness persisted during another cholera epidemic in 1862, and gave rise to the depiction of the disease as an embodied chimera in popular culture, in nishiki-e (colored prints). The circulation of images associated specifically with disease was not unusual–indeed, woodblock prints depicting measles (hashika-e), smallpox (hōsō-e) and cholera (korera-e) came to be referred to as distinct categories of Edo art by later scholars.¹⁹ Many of these popular images were drawn to serve as an amulet or protection against the illness, while others prescribed treatments or shared information.²⁰ And while imagined differently by various artists, one of the most famous korera-e by Takeijrō Kimura depicts a chimeric beast as the embodiment of cholera. This korera-e features a creature with the head of a tiger, body of a wolf, and testicles of the tanuki. The creature rages against medics labeled the “Hygiene Army” spraying disinfectants and antiseptics on the monster as people are trampled beneath the beast, in a visual metaphor for the ferocity of the illness.²¹ 

Cholera embodied as a chimera of tiger, wolf, and tanuki in nishiki-e, a kind of multicolored woodblock print 

Indeed, the association of tiger, wolf, and tanuki with cholera became widespread enough that media in the Meiji period (1868-1912) imagined the pathogen korōri as a yōkai. This creature was referred to either as korōri or korōrijū, a chimera sometimes depicted in popular media with the stripes of a tiger; the face and tail of a wolf; and belly of the tanuki. During the 1870s, some popular newspapers offered accounts of appearances of this beast in houses where people fell ill.²³ While folklorists argued it never became a very popular yōkai, it remains identifiable and associated with cholera to this day. 

 The appearance of this chimera became standard enough that it also appears in the two prints below, by Naoyoshi Hashimoto (1877). These offered advice for preventing cholera, but also depicted the disease as a ghostly chimera hovering above sufferers. The text in the first image contains advice such as keep the room and the patient dry and clean, ventilate the room, and not to over-hydrate.²⁵ The second image offers specific prescriptions for treatment of the illness, such as a medicinal compound made of “dry ginger, cinnamon bark, and ginkgo” among other herbs, and the application of cotton soaked in warmed shōchū (Japanese liquor) on the stomach.²⁶ While the advice would have been practical, in both of these images we see tanuki imagined as a pathogenic, part of a newly imagined yokai reflecting public fear of illness. 

“Prevention of Cholera,” a pair of images. Naoyoshi Hashimoto, 1877.

News outlets today are also covering animal origins of illness. Reports that tanuki may have been a host for the novel coronavirus first appeared in 2020, but data only recently confirmed what was previously more speculative.²⁷ It is a long way from the tanuki chimera as the embodiment of cholera to tanuki as a potential zoonotic host for COVID-19. Or is it? As Foster has argued and these examples have shown, tanuki are liminal creatures, close enough to us to be familiar folklore staples while wild enough to be representative of potentially dangerous contact with the unknown. The animal has always been uncanny, unsettling, disruptive, chaotic. In the chimeric depictions of the creature in Edo and Meiji media, the beast served as an embodiment of humanity’s fear of cholera, a malevolent entity that crosses boundaries, invading our bodies and making us sick. Much later, in Pom Poko, tanuki have also served as a mirror through which to question human behavior and reflect our anxieties and worst behavior. They haunt us and speak to the fears and conflicts in our society. As Melek Ortabasi points out, tanuki can be used as an “animal other to explore the self.”²⁸ And while the Wuhan wet market that has been the subject of much public discourse is hardly the site of Japanese folkloric encounters, I would suggest that perhaps there is a lesson in the news we are reading today that tanuki have taught us before, throughout Japanese history—the dangers of human arrogance and selfishness. 

Perhaps there is also a lesson about how folklore begins; the reading of Covid-19 as punishment for human mistreatment of animals is an easy jump to make.²⁹ Nature indeed has its revenge, and perhaps it is fitting that the tanuki is part of it.  In the Meiji nishiki-e and Edo media depictions of korori discussed above, disease is chimeric, unnatural; these unnatural animals (unnatural treatment of animals?) result in danger to humanity. When liminal space breaks down, it is hard to reestablish boundaries, and we cannot blame the tanuki for reflecting what we have ourselves wrought. Like the tanuki appearing as shapeshifting tricksters in folklore, this pandemic has highlighted the fragile points of our society and helped us to articulate some of our cultural anxieties. Contemporary media reports about tanuki, when put in dialogue with the past, remind us that news is never reported in a vacuum. Rethinking the news through broader contexts can serve to remind us of the connection between human, animal and yōkai, between past and present, between folklore and science. In a world of modern medicine and technology, when it is so easy to get lost in the news, it can also be important to take a step back and remember that folklore and yōkai may also still have a place and lessons to teach.   

Kathryn M. Tanaka, associate professor at the University of Hyogo, is a Japanese literary scholar and big fan of Studio Ghibli and yōkai who works on the intersections of medicine, literature, and culture. Her work focuses primarily on Hansen’s disease and modern Japanese literature in the early twentieth century, in particular writing by women and children.  She has published articles about Hansen’s disease and literature in Japan, and some translations. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript on gender and Hansen’s disease but has a tandem project on sociocultural responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including Amabie and now tanuki. Her twitter handle is @KathrynTanaka18 and much of her work can be found at https://linktr.ee/kathryn.tanaka.

1. See, for example, Benjamin Mueller, “New Data Links Pandemic’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market,” The New York Times, March 16 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/science/covid-wuhan-market-raccoon-dogs-lab-leak.html; Michaeleen Doucleff and Jason Beaubien, “WHO Calls on China to Share Data on Raccoon Dog Link to Pandemic. Here’s What We Know,” NPR: Goats and Soda: Stories of Life in a Changing World, March 17, 2023, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/03/17/1164226694/who-calls-on-china-to-share-data-on-raccoon-dog-link-to-pandemic-heres-what-we-k; and “New Data Links Covid-19’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market,” The Guardian, March 17, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/covid-19-origins-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-data.
2. Violet H. Harada, “The Badger in Japanese Folklore,” Asian Folklore Studies 35 (1) (1976): 1-6. 
3. Michael Dylan Foster, “Haunting Modernity: Tanuki, Trains, and Transformation in Japan,” Asian Ethnology 71, 1 (2012): 3-29. See also Markus Vrataner, “Tanuki: The ‘Badger’ as Figure in Japanese Literature,” Vienna Graduate Journal of East Asian Studies, Volume 1. Eds. Rudiger Frank, Ingrid Getreuer-Kargl, Lukas Pokorny and Agnes Schick-Chen. Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2011: 147-170. There is also a summary and discussion of Kachi Kachi Yama and Bunbuku Chagama in this article. 
4. Foster, “Haunting Modernity,” 3.
5. For more on the tanuki in Edo-period popular culture, in particular in colored woodblock prints and in popular fiction and a fairly extensive look at the symbolism of the tanuki in Japanese culture, see Mark Shumacher, “Tanuki in Japanese Artwork,” A to Z Photo Dictionary: Japanese Buddhist Statuary–Gods, Goddesses, Shinto Kami, Creatures & Demons.https://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/tanuki.shtml. 
6. Markus Vrataner, “Tanuki;” see also  Ei Ō, “Miyazaki Kenji shoki bungaku ni okeru disutopia: “Chōcho to namekuji to tanuki” wo chūshin ni” [Dystopia in the early works of Miyazaki Kenji: “The Butterfly, the Slug and the Tanuki], Hikaku shakai bunka kenkyū [Social and Cultural Studies] 10 (2001): 19-26; and Yukari Sato, “Masamune Hakuchō “Tanuki no haratsuzumi” ron–Hakuchō no sengo no bungakukan wo kangaeru” [Theories of Masamune Hakucho’s “Tanuki’s Belly-drum:” Thinking about Hakucho’s postwar sense of literature], Kirisuto-kyō bungaku kenkyū [Research on Christian Literature] 28 (2011): 77-89.
7. Although by no means exhaustive, a playlist of examples of songs featuring tanuki can be found here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHRZ9_-GZk0PI91luTl4B6YwcXnEvMuB1.
8. Christopher Ingram, “Feature: How Japanese Folklore Inspired Mario’s Tanooki Suit,” Nintendo Life, November 12, 2011, https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2011/11/feature_how_japanese_folklore_inspired_marios_tanooki_suit. 
9. “Tom Nook,” Animal Crossing Wiki, https://animalcrossing.fandom.com/wiki/Tom_Nook. 
10. Isao Takahata, Pom Poko (Tokyo: Studio Ghibli Entertainment, 1994). See also Melek Ortabasi, “(Re)animating Folklore: Raccoon Dogs, Foxes, and Other Supernatural Japanese Citizens in Takahata Isao’s Heisei tanuki Gassen Pompoko,” Marvels & Tales 27: The Fairy Tale in Japan, 2 (2013), 254-275.
11. Todd Andrew  Borlik, “Carnivalesque Ecoterrorism in Pom Poko,” Journal of the Environmental Humanities 2, 3 (2015): 127-133. 
12. This particular scene, in all its chaos, is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFPaSIy–50.
13. For more, see Linda Lombardi, “Tanuki: The Canine Yokai with Gigantic Balls,” Tofugu, January 30, 2015, https://www.tofugu.com/japan/tanuki/;  Cesary Jan Strusiewicz, “How Did Comically Endowed Tanuki Become Symbols of Good Fortune in Japan?” Tokyo Weekender, July 21, 2020, https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/tanuki-testicles-in-japanese-art/; Alice Gordenker, “Tanuki Genitals,” The Japan Times, July 15, 2008, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2008/07/15/reference/tanuki-genitals/; and Tara M. McGowan, “Testicular Tanuki Tales: Japanese Folk Humor for Children with a Ribald Satirical Twist,” Cotsen’s Children’s Library, Princeton University, September 8, 2017, https://blogs.princeton.edu/cotsen/2017/09/tanuki/.
14. “Tanuki—Badger,” Traditional Kyoto, https://traditionalkyoto.com/culture/figures/badgers/#:~:text=The%20promissory%20note%20represents%20the,environment%20and%20making%20good%20decisions.  
15.  Yukinori Hashino, “Cholera Outbreaks and Public Health in Modernizing Japan,” Nippon.com. April 20, 2020,  https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g00854/ and Robert Campbell and the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL), “Japanese Classics in a Time of Contagion” YouTube, April 24, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzU_iLRXz9g
16. William D. Johnston, “Buddhism Contra Cholera: How the Meiji State Recruited Religion Against Epidemic Disease,” eds. David G. Wittner and Philip C. Brown, Science, Technology and Medicine in the Modern Japanese Empire (New York: Routledge, 2016): 62-78.
17. Susan L. Burns, “Relocating Psychiatric Knowledge: Meiji Psychiatrists, Local Culture(s), and the Problem of Fox Possession,” Historia Scientiarum 22, 2 (2012): 88-109. 
18.  Bettina Gramlich-Oka, “The Body Economic: Japan’s Cholera Epidemic of 1858 in Popular Discourse,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 30 (2009): 32-73.
19.  Isao Shimizu, Edo giga jiten [Dictionary of Edo Humorous Art], Kyoto: Rinsen shoten, 2012: 130; Gregory Smits, “Warding off Calamity in Japan: A Comparison of the 1855 Catfish Prints and the 1862 Measles Prints,” EASTM 30 (2009): 9-31; Hartmut O. Rotermund and Royall Tyler, “Demonic Affliction of Contagious DIsease? Changing Perceptions of Smallpox in the Late Edo Period,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 28, 3/4 (2001): 373-398. 
20. Byoungdo Park, Kinsei Nihon no Saigai to Shūkyō [Disaster and Religion in Early Modern Japan]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2021; Takako Ito, “Kowai korori, tora no gotoku… korera no ryūkō” [Scary korori, like a tiger… cholera epidemics], Yomiuri Shimbun, July 26, 2010, https://yomidr.yomiuri.co.jp/article/20100726-OYTEW60106/.
21. Johnston, “Buddhism Contra Cholera,” 68. 
22.  Takeijrō Kimura, “Korera Taiji” (虎列刺退治, Expelling Cholera), 1886 (Meiji 19), 31×43 cm. In the collection of Naito Kinen Kusuri Hakubutsukan, https://www.eisai.co.jp/museum/history/0700/sub0103.html.
23. In reprinted discussions of yōkai in Edo and early Meiji newspapers targeting a popular audience, we can find examples of mentions and illustrations of this creature. See, for example, Satoshi Tanaka, Edo no yōkai jiken-bo [Cases of Edo Period Yōkai Incidents], Tokyo: Shueisha Shinsho, 2007 and Koichi Yumoto, ed. Meiji Yōkai Shimbun [Meiji Period Yōkai Newspapers]. Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo, 1999: 31-32. See also Satoshi Takahashi, Edo no korera sōdō [Edo Cholera Outbreaks], Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2020 and Robert Campbell, ed., Nihon koten to kansenshō [Japanese Classics and Infectious Disease]. Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2021. 
24. Reprinted in Yumoto, Meiji Yokai Shimbun, 32. 
25. “Ryūkō korera yobō no kokoroe” (流行虎列刺病予防の心得, Rules for the Prevention of Cholera), 1877 (Meiji 10), 35×24 cm. Hashimoto Naoyoshi. In the collection of Naito Kinen Kusuri Hakubutsukan, https://www.eisai.co.jp/museum/history/0700/sub0103.html.
26. “Ryūkō korera yobō no kokoroe” (流行虎列刺病予防の心得, Rules for the Prevention of Cholera), 1877 (Meiji 10), 35×24 cm. Hashimoto Naoyoshi. In the collection of Naito Kinen Kusuri Hakubutsukan, https://www.eisai.co.jp/museum/history/0700/sub0103.html.
27. Dana Thal, “The Origin of the Pandemic,” National-Schungsplattform für Zoonosen, May 10, 2020, https://zoonosen.net/en/origin-pandemic.
28. Ortabasi, “(Re)animating Folklore,” 272. 
29. Adam Vaughn, “How Our Abuse of Nature Makes Pandemics Like Covid-19 More Likely,” New Scientist, March 3, 2021, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933240-800-how-our-abuse-of-nature-makes-pandemics-like-covid-19-more-likely/.