19 October 2025
The Tanuki in Japanese Popular Culture (Oversized Balls and All)
First-time visitors to Japan are often struck by the abundance of statues of the Tanuki (Japanese Raccoon Dog), which we featured recently on our sibling site, the Ark in Space. Their first question when seeing these stout ceramic creatures for the first time is “What is that?” – and the second inevitable question is not about the straw hat, the sake bottle or the promissory note. It is “Why does it have such big balls?”. That’s a good (as well as obvious) question and, strangely enough, it has very little to do with fertility or masculinity. Although that probably doesn’t hurt.
First things first, however.
The tanuki is a canid endemic to Japan and has lived there much, much
longer than people. As such, after the
arrival of our species, the tanuki quickly became embedded in folklore. It is known as a mischievous shapeshifter
(known as Bake‑danuki) with a tendency to transform into trees, lanterns,
tea-kettles – even humans. It is known,
in folk stories, to reward kindness and has become known as a benevolent figure
of good luck and prosperity.
During even the briefest of meanders around metropolitan Japan, the visitor will
often spot a tanuki statue – or a pair – or multiples – or a myriad. You can’t
get too much of a good thing, after all.
They are most often situated outside of bars, restaurants and shops,
sometimes even outside homes (although they are not as prevalent as, say garden
gnomes in the UK). They serve as visual
shorthand for a simple message – come in, you’re welcome. If they were characters in the Star Trek universe
their greeting would possibly be “have fun and prosper”.
The statues come replete with messages to the visitor. The tanuki
statue has “eight lucky attributes” (八相縁起 hassō engi) which is a kind of folkloric mnemonic
describing each object the statue carries and what it represents.
The straw hat symbolises readiness, the big belly is for
boldness. European sensibilities might
label the sake bottle as representative of a good time to be had by all, but in
fact it signals virtue. The sake bottle’s symbolism comes from its social and
moral context in Japan, not from its literal alcoholic content. Sharing sake
has long been a ritual of honesty, communion, and good faith - from Shintō
offerings at shrines to the san-san-kudo (three-three-nine times) wedding
ceremony. To offer sake is to extend omotenashi (hospitality) and makoto
(sincerity of heart).
Then it has big eyes – not all the better for anything but
showing awareness and good judgement. The promissory note (sometimes an account
book) shows trustworthiness in business dealing and the big tail indicates
enduring success and steadiness. The
cheerful face is perhaps the most obvious – to indicate friendliness and that
visitors will be welcomed.
But why the over-sized scrotum and – one must assume – its contents?
The real tanuki is not over-endowed in the testicular department, and is
roughly proportional to other canids (dogs and foxes and so on) when it comes
to swinging and dangling. So, there is no foundation in real life, as it were. While the Japanese are known for their
cultural subtlety, the tanuki statue is the exception to the rule. There is nothing subtle about this particular
part of its anatomy and (perhaps unsurprisingly) it’s because it all boils down
to two things – luck and money.
The tanuki works because it blends a number of things - the
trickster, the folkloric, the commercial and the absurd. It’s daft but nonetheless
carries deep cultural weigth: transformation, laughter, good fortune, and the
promise of “more than you might expect”. The tanuki is the jolly jester with
golden bags - and yes, testicles you won’t mistake for anything subtle.
However, the tradition of the over-sized ceramic tanuki is
not as old as you might think. If you
went back a hundred years, you would not see rows of ceramic tanuki statues
outside restaurants and shops. The
modern-day prevalence is all down to a cunning plan by the potters of Shigaraki
in Shiga Prefecture. Since the 13th
century the town has been one of Japan’s major pottery centres and
traditionally, roof tiles, tea utensils and everyday ceramics was its stock in
trade.
However, that all changed in 1951 when Emperor Shōwa
(Hirohito) visited Shigaraki. The people
of the town, determined to make a lasting impression, lined the streets with over
a thousand ceramic tanuki statues. Each
one held a little flag to greet the Emperor, who was inordinately impressed and
delighted by what greeted his eyes. The
press had a field day and soon enough the Shigaraki tanuki had become the standard
figure across Japan with shops, restaurants and bars across Japan clamoring for
their own.
Tanuki fever never really died down. There is even a Tanuki
Village where you can buy any size tanuki in, you guessed it – Shagaraki.
The town enjoyed a revival of prosperity which persists to this day, thanks to its tanuki ceramics - a success that, rather neatly, circles back to the creature’s own famously oversized scrotum. The word for testicles in Japanese is “kintama” (金玉) — literally “golden balls” or “balls of gold”. The association between balls and gold quickly linked to luck, money, wealth. Hence, the bigger the balls, the luckier and wealthier the owner. The ceramic version may be hyperbole writ large but the message gets across. So, even before the Emperor’s visit, the tanuki was always generously endowed in whatever art it appeared in.
Edo-period artists had fun with the whole thing - the tanuki
using his scrotum as a drum, a boat sail, a rain-coat. It was a comedic motif
of shapeshifting and play and urban legends sprang up accordingly. One popular story traces the whole thing back
to metal-workers in Kanazawa. The (real)
tanuki apparently has a highly elastic skin on its scrotum and it was (supposedly)
used to hammer gold leaf because of this.
One has to wonder when (or how or why) the idea of using tanuki scrotum
skin first occurred to a Kanazawa metal-worker but it isn’t a method that
remains employed.
The idea of the testicularly gifted tanuki persists, however:
from everyday statues to anime and tourism. The film Pom Poko (1994) by Studio Ghibli
features tanuki that deploy their shapeshifting powers - including the
legendary scrotum-stretching manoeuvres.
It’s an image that persists long after the movie
is over…
Yet, when you see a ceramic tanuki, you’re not just seeing a
garden ornament with cannonballs: you’re getting a layered symbol of Japan’s
folklore, commerce, humour and cultural punning. And if you do look at those
enormous balls? They’re not just for giggles; they’re the gold-bags of
possibility, good fortune and luck.
