If you’re a super old school Tofugu reader, you might remember back in the day when Erin kicked off a series about mystical Japanese creatures called obake by writing about our large-balled racoon-dog friends, the tanuki. A whole three years later, I’ll be continuing the obake series with a write-up on kitsune. Hey, better late than never, right?
What’s Obake?
If you need a reminder, obake are mystical shapeshifters in Japanese folklore. There are lots of different obake, from well-endowed racoon-dogs to the cat-like bakeneko. Today, though, we’ll be focusing on the fox-like kitsune.
Kitsune aren’t your normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill foxes. They’re a type of mystical being that can change their shape, are really wise, and have long lifespans. You can also tell kitsune apart from ordinary foxes because of their multiple tails; a kitsune can have up to nine tails depending on how old and wise it is. Some say that kitsune only gets its first extra tail after it turns 100 years old.
Different Types of Kitsune
There are tons of different kinds of kitsune too, that range from faithful servants to tricksters to just plain jerks who want to cause trouble.
The biggest role that kitsune play are servants to Inari, the Shinto god of rice, fertility and agriculture. Inari’s kitsune servants are supposedly all pure white, and run messages between Inari and the mortal world. Some people even speculate that Inari itself is a kitsune in disguise. A little over a third of the Shinto shrines in Japan are dedicated to Inari, making it one of the most popular gods in Japan.
Inari even has a type of sushi named after it the inarizushi, which is rice inside of a fried tofu pouch. The symbolism is twofold because not only is Inari the god of rice and agriculture, but fried tofu is supposed to be the favorite food of kitsune. Inarizushi even has pointed corners, like little fox ears. (If you squint, they kind of look like foxes, right?)
Most kitsune aren’t lucky enough to be servants to a god. In fact, kitsune are probably most commonly depicted as tricksters. As you might imagine, the ability to change shape makes the kitsune a pretty tricky creature. If you’ve read Koichi’s post about what “moshi moshi” means, then you know that supposedly one of the reasons people say “moshi moshi” when answering the phone is that kitsune can’t say “moshi moshi.” You don’t want a kitsune prank-calling you, right? It’s kind of like an ancient Japanese Turing Test. Why can’t kitsune say “moshi moshi?” Who knows. Maybe their little fox mouths can’t quite articulate the words all the way.
Bad Romance
It’s a trap!
Lots of Japanese folklore talks about kitsune that take the shape of a beautiful woman to seduce and marry Japanese men. Awkward? A little bit. Effective? Apparently so. Most of the time though, the men figure out that they’ve accidentally married a mystical being (the tails were probably a giveaway), and leave their kitsune-wives out of shame. In some cases though, the unholy union of man and fox-spirit literally gives birth to weird kitsune-children who are endowed with special powers. They also probably get picked on all the time at school, but that’s not really talked about as much.
In Pop Culture
Kitsune show up all over the place in Japanese pop culture . If you played any Legend of Zelda video game in the last 10 years or so, you’ve probably run into a kitsune, whether or not you knew it. The multi-tailed foxes show up in the series as creatures called Keatons who are – unsurprisingly – mystical beings.
If you’ve ever played, watched, or read Pokemon, then you’ve also probably seen the series’ kitsune-themed creatures, complete with multiple tails and trickyness. One of the kitsune-themed Pokemon is even called “Ninetails.”
So next time you bust out the old Nintendo 64 to play Zelda, or when you go to a sushi restaurant and have a craving for some fried tofu, or answer the phone with a “moshi moshi,” keep the kitsune in mind and make sure that you don’t get tricked by their wily fox skills.
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