The tanuki (狸, raccoon dog) is a typical animal of Japan, but it is also a mythological character within Shintoism. The representations describe him as a character wearing a straw hat, a bottle of sake and … He is dragging his gigantic scrotum.
Within the Japanese folklore, this character is considered the chubby brother of kitsune And like the latter, he also tends to make jokes about humans. He is considered a comic character. Your scrotum, which can become enlarged, uses it in many ways. It can transform into an umbrella, sheets, a boat, or even a weapon.
The tanuki can take tree leaves and make them look like gold coins, with which he satisfies his taste for drink, food and women. It also has the ability to transform into inanimate objects, like a kettle in the story Bunbuku chagama (ぶ ん ぶ く 茶 釜).
This story is that of a penniless street vendor who saves a tanuki. This animal in gratitude transforms into a old teapot for the vendor to sell to a priest at a nearby temple. The priest buys it and gives the seller some coins and decides to use the kettle to make tea.
As soon as the priest puts the kettle on the flame, the tanuki returns to its normal form. However, he is left with the teapot torso. Then flee the temple and return to the seller. The seller does not know what to do with the creature, until it occurs to him to put on a show of a tightrope “kettle”. The seller and the tanuki they earn a lot of money and become friends.
