Why Tanuki Trip

The tanuki, Japan's folklore trickster

The tanuki is a real animal: the Japanese raccoon dog, a small wild canid of Japan's forests and farmland. It gets mistranslated as a raccoon or a badger. It's neither.

A Japanese raccoon dog with brown and gray fur and a dark mask around the eyes, standing in dry grass — A tanuki in the flesh: a Japanese raccoon dog. Photo: Ken Ishigaki, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

In the old stories it changes shape. It passes itself off as a person, an object, sometimes a monk, and plays tricks on whoever crosses its path. It drums on its big belly, and the sound gets written "pon poko." The best-known tale, Bunbuku Chagama, has a tanuki turned teakettle serving a monk tea that never runs out.

In Japan you'll mostly meet it in ceramic, standing guard outside restaurants, inns and shops. The statues come from Shigaraki, a pottery village in Shiga Prefecture, near Kyoto. They went national after November 15, 1951, when Emperor Showa passed through Shigaraki: the townspeople lined the road with tanuki, each holding a small Japanese flag, and the emperor wrote a poem about it that the newspapers picked up. A year later the statue was given eight virtues, one per feature. The straw hat keeps off trouble and bad weather. The sake flask is virtue. The account book (the kind a shopkeeper kept to log what regulars bought on credit) stands for trust in business; the big belly, for keeping calm when it's time to decide.

A black and white ceramic tanuki statue with a straw hat and a sake flask, Bar Alchemist painted on its belly — In Kyoto, Bar Alchemist has a tanuki of its own, with the bar's name painted across the belly.

Pom Poko, Ghibli's tanuki

If the tanuki rings a bell, it's probably from Pom Poko, Isao Takahata's 1994 film for Studio Ghibli. The tanuki of the Tama Hills, on the edge of Tokyo, watch their forest get bulldozed for a new town. So they relearn the forgotten art of shape-shifting to scare the humans off, building up to a full-scale ghost parade meant to convince everyone the neighborhood is haunted. The Japanese title borrows the sound of their bellies. In 1994 it was the highest-grossing Japanese film in Japan.

It's funny, and sadder than it first looks.

Seven tanuki sitting in the snow outside a wooden house, one playing guitar, one playing harmonica, the rest singing — A band of tanuki singing in the snow, guitar and harmonica, in *Pom Poko*. Image © 1994 Isao Takahata/Studio Ghibli, NH. Source: Studio Ghibli, www.ghibli.jp, entry « スタジオジブリ作品静止画 ».

Tanuki Trip: clearing the brush on a Japan trip

A trip to Japan comes with its own quirks, and its own things to know.

Ryokan inns, the traditional kind, load their calendars roughly six months before the night, all at once. Ghibli Museum tickets come out on the 10th of every month at 10 a.m. Japan time, which is 9 p.m. on the 9th on the East Coast (8 p.m. from November to March). And even once you've found the information, it doesn't read the way it would at home. A ryokan quotes a price per person, dinner included; a chain hotel quotes one per room, with no meals.

That's the sorting Tanuki Trip does. Plenty of sites carry information that's out of date, and even the translations on official Japanese sites sometimes contradict the Japanese original, which doesn't make the job any easier. Tanuki Trip works to keep its information relevant and current. Free email reminders keep you up to date as well.

What we won't do for you

We don't book anything and we don't take payment. You book yourself, on the hotel's or the ticket seller's own site, with your own card. Booking or collecting money on someone else's behalf is a travel agent's job, and it comes with a license and legal obligations. What you get here is the information and the how-to. The money stays in your hands.

Tanuki Trip's affiliate links

Some links are affiliate links: if you book after clicking one, we earn a commission, and you pay the same price you'd pay without it. It doesn't change what we recommend. Our Shibuya Sky guide sends you to the ticket office through an affiliate link, and still tells you that you can see Tokyo from above for free, no ticket needed, from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku.