Bake-danuki

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Names & Creature Profile

Bake-danuki belongs to the transforming tanuki of Japanese stories: an animal able to impersonate a person or inhabit the shape of an ordinary object. Older English versions often call it a badger. The actual tanuki is a raccoon dog, a member of the dog family. Zoologist Imaizumi Tadaaki describes a nocturnal omnivore living in woodland and alongside human settlements—a familiar neighbour from which an unfamiliar presence could emerge. [3]

Violet H. Harada’s folklore survey distinguishes avengers, grateful friends and pranksters. Her examples include tanuki disguised as wrestlers who drive robbers from a benefactor’s house, and an illusory house whose inhabitants deceive a visiting physician. Transformation can protect a household or make the household itself a trap. [2]

Tales & Encounters

Grace James begins The Tea-Kettle, published in Japanese Fairy Tales in 1910, at Morinji temple in the province she calls Kotsuke. Its priest is learned in religious observances, devoted to the tea ceremony and alert to a bargain. Finding a neglected bronze kettle in a shop, he dismisses it as an ugly scrap and buys it cheaply. A novice cleans it, revealing fine workmanship. The priest sets his treasure on a box covered with purple cloth and gazes at it until his eyes close. [4]

While he sleeps, a hairy head peers from the spout. Four brown paws and a bushy tail emerge; the lid jumps. The kettle climbs down, inspects the room and begins to sing and dance. The novices next door laugh at what they suppose is their master’s noise, until one looks through the partition. One novice fears witchcraft, another kneels to recite sutras, and a third wants a closer look. Soon they are chasing the kettle, slipping on the mats as it leaps beyond their reach. When the priest wakes, however, it sits quietly on its box. He rebukes the exhausted novices for surrendering to illusion. [4]

That evening he fills it with spring water and places it over the fire. As the water boils, the kettle cries out at the heat and jumps away. Now the priest calls for help. By the time the novices arrive, it has resumed its innocent shape. They repeat his own warning about illusion back to him. He sells the troublesome bronze to a tinker for twenty copper coins, assuring the buyer that the price is almost a gift. The tinker carries it home pleased with his purchase and puts it beside his bed. [4]

At midnight, in the moonlight, the kettle moves again. Its animal limbs appear, and it comes close enough to lay a paw on the tinker. This time someone listens. The kettle explains that it is not wicked, but it likes to be treated well: at the temple it was abused, beaten and set on the fire. The tinker approves of its spirit. When he offers to keep it in a lacquer box, it asks instead to stay beside him, with conversation, a pipe, rice, beans and sweet things. An occasional cup of sake would be welcome too. As the night has grown chilly, it asks to share his bed. He agrees.

Homeland & Tradition

The kettle’s body was a joke people could recognise before it moved. In his Kyoto National Museum essay, Tomoyasu Kubo points to the resemblance between a tanuki’s imagined round belly and the rounded middle of a Japanese tea kettle. Such a vessel boils water; it does not hold prepared tea. The animal’s transformation takes possession of a familiar household shape. [7]

Historical Record

An early seventeenth-century stoneware figure in the Metropolitan Museum offers another meeting between the tanuki and tea utensils. Only six centimetres high, it is both a water-dropper, or suiteki, and a possible rest for a kettle lid, called a futa-oki. The catalogue identifies Mino ware of the E-Shino type, decorated with iron beneath feldspar glaze. Its broad hat, open mouth and rounded body give the small implement a companionable presence. Here the animal’s humour belongs to an object designed to be handled, filled or set beside a kettle. [8]

Appearance & Signs

James lets the transformation remain visibly unfinished: bronze and animal share a body. The head comes through the spout, the lid bobs above it, and paws and a tail turn a stationary utensil into something capable of escaping its owners. Just as abruptly, those signs vanish. The priest dismisses the novices because he sees a quiet kettle; later they find precisely the same reason to doubt him. The disguise controls when each witness can prove what has happened. [4]

Nature & Powers

In a tale discussed by Imaizumi, a supposed servant carries a sake bottle and a ledger, collecting customers’ money. His tail eventually exposes him. Imaizumi suggests that darkness, drink and the movements of real animals might help explain such encounters; these are proposed explanations, not established histories of how the stories began. The tale itself gives the fraud a precise weakness: the servant has mastered the role but cannot quite conceal the animal. [3]

Harada records disguises as different as a priest, a woman, a stone or a tree, along with belly-drumming that lures listeners into ditches and swamps. Her survey also includes cruelty, retaliation and tricks that backfire. Benevolence is one possibility among these accounts, not an obligation imposed by the creature’s shape. [2]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Kubo distinguishes two reasons for becoming a kettle. In one version, a tanuki rewards a poor man who helped it by performing for money. In another, it changes shape to escape a priest who wants to eat it, only to sprout limbs again when placed on the fire. The recurring utensil can shelter an escape or make a livelihood possible. [7]

Meaning & Belief

The two English kettle stories differ most sharply in who decides what happens next. In Mitford’s version, human beings capture, sell, exhibit and eventually honour the creature. James gives the kettle its own terms: companionship instead of storage, a shared bed instead of a fire, work it proposes itself, and a final destination it chooses. The tinker listens where the priest had dismissed what he heard. Their prosperity follows that change in treatment; it does not produce it. [5][4]

James also leaves a loss that success cannot repair. The kettle remains physically present after its voice falls silent, but the friend who could answer the tinker has gone. Giving it to the temple fulfils its last request. Its new sacred status cannot undo the moment when two companions discover that they will not grow old together. [4]

Later Retellings & Reception

In Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, published in 1894, Lafcadio Hearn describes meeting a tanuki made for an audience. He and his gardener, Kinjuro, visit a winter festival after dark. Lanterns line the approach, and temporary shops and theatres fill the temple grounds. Inside an exhibition of lifelike figures, they pass behind a black curtain from which screams are coming. A sign promises a gift to anyone who can get through without being frightened. Beyond it lies an artificial graveyard, its concealed roof and carefully arranged light giving the impression of the open night. [6]

A towering Buddhist priest stands behind a hedge with its back towards them. Kinjuro identifies it as a tanuki-bōzu, the priestly disguise of a tanuki that Hearn associates with leading late travellers to destruction. They go closer to see its face. Suddenly it reaches over the hedge towards Hearn, moaning, then falls back with a creak. Invisible strings have supplied the movement, but the knowledge comes too late to prevent him jumping. He concedes that he will not win the promised gift. Both men laugh and continue among the exhibits. Other spectators linger to enjoy the next visitor’s fright: the deception has become a pleasure they can share. [6]

Landscape & Associations

A railway legend reproduced by folklorist Michael Dylan Foster puts imitation directly in the path of a machine. In a newspaper account dated 3 May 1889, a train nearing Okegawa meets another coming towards it. Both whistle, but the apparent distance scarcely changes. The driver accelerates; the phantom vanishes. Two tanuki lie dead on the track, and he makes them into soup. Foster reads such endings as part of the upheaval of modernisation: the old deceiver can imitate the new power, but cannot withstand it. [1]

Evidence & Open Questions

Foster cautions that the circumstances in which the railway legends were told are often unknown. Their endings might celebrate progress defeating an old nuisance, mourn what progress destroys, or accommodate both responses. His analysis does not establish that every teller opposed railways. The dead animal remains the cost of the driver’s victory, whether the audience finds that ending gratifying or cruel. [1]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

James’s complete Tea-Kettle and the Mitford tale printed in William Patten’s Junior Classics are the two English narratives compared here. Hearn supplies a first-person account of a staged apparition. Harada and Foster bring together other records; the older works they cite are represented here through their discussions. Kubo explains the kettle, Imaizumi the living animal, and the Metropolitan Museum documents the surviving ceramic object. [4][5][6][2][1][7][3][8]

Haunting Modernity: Tanuki, Trains, and Transformation in Japan ↗
Michael Dylan Foster · Asian Ethnology / Nanzan Institute · 2012 · English
Asian Ethnology 71(1), pp. 3–17 historically consulted; p. 15 (1889 newspaper account), p. 17 (interpretive limits)
The 1889 newspaper account is consulted through Foster’s reproduction and analysis, not the original newspaper.
Checked 2026-10-10
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Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

A furry tanuki face, paws and bushy tail emerge from a bronze tea kettle on a woven mat. — An original interpretation of the transforming tea-kettle in Grace James’s Bunbuku Chagama telling. The face, paws and tail follow that story; the moonlit room is an artistic choice.

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