Term · Japanese culture
Tanuki
A real animal that trots through Tokyo suburbs at night, and a folklore drunk who can turn into a teapot.
In Otakana the clue reads: Raccoon dog with a talent for disguise
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Japanese culture
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
The animal is the raccoon dog, a wild canid native to East Asia with a masked face that has nothing to do with raccoons. They are common in Japan, including in cities, and they do something no other dog-family animal does: in cold regions they put on fat and sleep through the worst of winter. English speakers who translate the word as badger or raccoon are wrong twice.
Folklore makes it a shapeshifter and a prankster, less clever than the fox and much better company. It disguises itself as a monk, pays for sake with leaves that turn back into leaves by morning, and drums on its own belly at night in the woods. Bunbuku Chagama, the story of a tanuki that becomes a tea kettle and cannot hold the shape when heated, is the one every Japanese child hears.
Pottery statues stand outside restaurants and bars, holding a sake flask in one hand and an unpaid bill in the other, wearing a straw hat and a wide grin. Studio Ghibli gave the animal a whole film in 1994 with Pom Poko, in which a tanuki community fights suburban development with shapeshifting and loses anyway.
Spelling TANUKI
TANUKI runs consonant and vowel in strict alternation for six letters, and its vowels are A, U and I, all different. Nothing doubles and no long vowel gets dropped, so the spelling matches the sound exactly. The one thing to watch is the middle: it is NU and not NO, which is the slip people make when typing the word from memory.