Kitsune, the Fox Spirits of Japan

The red fox lives across Japan, and for farmers it was a familiar neighbour. Foxes appear at dusk, cry strangely at night and hunt the mice that eat stored rice. Such habits may help explain why the fox came to be linked with the rice harvest and with the uncanny. Japan also inherited a rich body of Chinese fox lore, in which the huli jing, the fox spirit, seduces scholars, bewitches households and, after a thousand years, grows nine tails and ascends to heaven.

The earliest Japanese fox tale with a clear date comes from the Nihon Ryōiki, a collection of Buddhist stories compiled in the early 9th century. A man marries a beautiful woman who bears him a son, but the family dog barks at her until she reveals herself as a fox. Her husband tells her that, since they have shared a child, she should still ‘come and sleep’, kitsu-ne, and the story offers this as the origin of the word. The etymology is folk explanation, but the tale sets a pattern: the fox wife who loves her human family but must leave when discovered.

By the Heian period foxes were thought to play tricks in the capital itself. Around 1100 the court scholar Ōe no Masafusa wrote the Kobiki, a short record of incidents attributed to foxes, such as people led astray by phantom carriages and illusions.

The fox’s most respected role is as messenger of Inari, the kami of rice, agriculture and later of trade and prosperity. According to shrine tradition, Inari was first worshipped on Mount Inari in Kyoto in 711, and the shrine there, Fushimi Inari Taisha, is today the head of the Inari shrines, usually counted at about 30,000. Its slopes are covered with thousands of vermilion torii donated by businesses and families.

At Inari shrines pairs of stone foxes guard the approach. One often holds a jewel and the other a key, said to be the key to the granary, though scrolls and sheaves of rice also appear. Worshippers bring offerings of fried tofu, which tradition says the foxes love. In Shinto teaching the foxes are servants of the kami, not Inari itself, but in popular devotion the fox and the deity have often been merged. Buddhists honour Inari as well: at Toyokawa Inari in Aichi prefecture, a Zen temple, the deity is identified with Dakiniten, a figure of Indian origin pictured riding a white fox.

Folklore gives foxes a wide range of powers. They take human shape, create illusions of houses and feasts, and light the ghostly kitsunebi, fox fire. A sun shower is called a ‘fox’s wedding’, kitsune no yomeiri. The older a fox, the stronger it is, and the more tails it grows, up to nine. Some foxes are benevolent and loyal to Inari; others are wild foxes that delight in deceiving travellers.

The fox also had a place in the worship of ordinary households. Farmers set up small Inari shrines at the edge of their fields, and merchants installed them in shops and on rooftops, hoping for good harvests and good trade. In the Edo period Inari became so popular in the city of Edo that a common saying named shops called Iseya, Inari shrines and dog droppings as the things found everywhere in town. Many of these small shrines survive today, tucked between office buildings, still visited by workers who leave a coin, a bow and sometimes a piece of fried tofu for the fox.

The most famous wicked fox is Tamamo-no-Mae. In a legend that took shape in the 14th and 15th centuries, a beautiful and learned woman appears at the court of the retired emperor Toba in the 12th century. The emperor falls mysteriously ill, and a court diviner of the Abe family reveals that she is a nine-tailed fox who had earlier ruined kings in India and China. She flees to Nasu in the east, where warriors kill her, and her spirit enters a stone, the Sesshō-seki or ‘killing stone’, said to kill anything that touched it. The stone still stands at Nasu, and when it was found split in 2022 the news travelled across Japan.

Gentler stories are just as popular. In the tale of Kuzunoha, made famous by 18th-century puppet plays, a white fox takes human form, marries the man who saved her and gives birth to Abe no Seimei, the renowned diviner. When her identity is discovered she leaves, writing a farewell poem telling her son to look for her in the forest of Shinoda. Such stories present the fox as a devoted mother and wife.

Folklore also told of kitsunetsuki, possession by a fox. People said to be possessed might speak in strange voices, crave fried tofu or behave wildly, and exorcists, priests and yamabushi were called to drive the fox out. In some rural areas certain families were believed to keep foxes that served them and harmed others. These kitsunemochi families could be shunned and find it hard to marry. From the late 19th century, Meiji doctors began to describe fox possession as a form of mental illness, and the belief slowly faded, though historians note that its social effects lasted into the 20th century.

Kitsune remain part of everyday Japan. Millions of people visit Fushimi Inari each year, buying fox-shaped votive plaques on which they draw faces and write wishes. Udon and soba topped with fried tofu are called kitsune, and inari-zushi, rice in fried tofu pouches, is named after the same offering. Fox masks appear at festivals, and the fox’s wedding is re-enacted in a few towns as a costumed procession.

Abroad, the kitsune has become one of the best-known figures of Japanese folklore. The nine-tailed fox sealed inside the hero of the manga Naruto, the Pokémon Vulpix and Ninetales, and many novels and games draw on the shapeshifting fox. These modern versions often mix Japanese, Chinese and Korean traditions, where the nine-tailed gumiho is usually more dangerous. Behind them stands a long tradition in which the fox is neither simply good nor simply evil, but a clever, powerful neighbour between the human world and the world of the kami.