Boisterous, merry alcoholic pranksters, the legendary tanuki were normally depicted with enormous testicles, on which they could fly. His character was like your drunken grandfather- borrowing money, getting intoxicated, and dragging his sagging scrotum across your fresh-mopped kitchen floor. A common schoolyard song in Japan makes explicit reference to the tanuki's endowment.
‘Tan Tan Tanuki's bollocks ring:
The wind's stopped blowing,
but they swing-swing-swing!’
Tanuki were mystical shape-shifting magical tricksters. In some stories, they turned horse excrement into delicious looking meals and served it to travelers; or transformed into humans, got drunk, and bought brothel services with leaves temporarily transformed into money, adding counterfeiting to their long list of felonies.
Tanuki had eight special traits that brought good fortune, coinciding with the hachi ‘eight’ symbol on the sake bottles they held- a hat to protect against bad weather, big eyes to scan the horizon, a sake bottle representing virtue, a big tail to provide steadiness and strength, an over-sized scrotum symbolizing financial luck, a promissory note exemplifying trust or confidence, a big belly signifying bold and calm decisiveness, and a friendly smile. Great subject matter, they frequently materialized in Japanese woodcut ukiyo-e, as in Utagawa Kuniyoshi's Seven Wonders of the Clowning Raccoon, in which a tanuki is shown as the magical nutsack beast, cheerily dancing his way around a geisha house.
But there is one Japanese folktale, in which a tanuki is the villain, worse even than the raccoon gangsters that perpetually threaten our Vancouver Island vineyard grape harvest. The legend of Kachi-kachi Yama, ‘Fire-Crackle Mountain,’ an onomatopoeia of the sound a fire makes, and mountain ‘yama,’ is the story of The Farmer and the Badger.
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