Mujina

What it is

Mujina is an old Japanese word, written 貉, that has carried more than one animal. It chiefly means the Japanese badger, and by tradition it also covers the Japanese raccoon dog, the tanuki, which is why the two get mixed up. In folklore the same word names a yōkai, a supernatural creature of Japanese story. This mujina is described as having a raccoon's face on a badger's body. It is a shapeshifter and a trickster, said to take human form for pranks, to drum music on its swollen belly, and to hold a grudge only when its den or family is threatened. People tell of it gratefully repaying those who feed it.

Where it comes from

The word is old, and the creature is old in writing too. The Nihon Shoki, a court chronicle, records that in the spring of Empress Suiko's thirty-fifth year, which is 627, there were mujina in Mutsu province that became human and sang. That notice is the earliest appearance in literature, and it shows the idea of a deceiving shapeshifter was already current then. Later collections add detail. Lafcadio Hearn put a story called "Mujina" into Kwaidan, his book of Japanese ghost tales, though the piece he told concerns a faceless apparition rather than a badger. Muddles between badger, raccoon dog and other animals run through the record from early on.

How it is done

Tales describe the change itself rather than any procedure. A mujina is said to take almost any shape: a one-eyed old woman, a tax official, a fence post, a stone, a tree, a comet. Most often it chooses a woman's form to draw men near, or dresses in the black robe of a Buddhist priest, the tanuki-bôzu, and settles beneath a temple with a lotus leaf worn upside down on its head. One story has a traveller shelter at a lonely hut that turns out to be the creature. The disguise is said to waver: a sleeping mujina may lose part or all of its borrowed look.

Tools and materials

Its props come from its own body and from what it borrows. The swollen belly serves as a drum, beaten while it sings, and some tales stretch the same trick to the scrotum, said to spread across an area the size of eight mats, a measure taken from room flooring. The priest disguise includes the black robe and a lotus leaf turned upside down on the head. It is also said to make a pale fire, tanuki-bi, resembling the will-o'-the-wisp that travellers meet at night.

What it is for

The pranks are usually called harmless, and one stated aim is practice: a mujina tests how well it can copy a person and carry off the mannerisms. It is held to keep a gentle side as well. In one account a family named Kitabayashi fed a group of badgers for a time, and when burglars broke in and threatened them, the grown badgers came back as huge wrestlers and drove the intruders off. Anger is rare and tied to home ground, such as a wrecked den or an attack on the young, and the harm then can be serious.

Peoples and places

The animal and the story belong to Japan, and the names shift by district. Around Shimōsa the creature is called kabukiri-kozō: a small monk in an oddly short kimono, hair cut in a bob like the kappa water spirit, met on quiet roads after dark. In the Osaka and Kishū area, the fire-making badger is said to show itself on wet nights. Reports also come from Hawaii. A 1959 newspaper account placed one at a drive-in cinema in Kahala, and a local folklorist gathered further supposed sightings between 'Ewa Beach and Hilo.

What people believe

Behind the tales sits a world where animals can borrow human shape, and where the change carries a faint shine, much as the kitsune fox is said to glow. Because the disguise is supernatural, seeing through it is a test of character: a true hero is said to spot the mujina, while a man who believes too easily is fooled and pays for it. Practical checks appear in the stories, such as noticing dry clothing on a rainy walk, though that only helps in the right weather. The form is not fixed, and sleep is said to loosen it.

When it is done

Timing in the stories is set by weather and by the hour. The ghost-fire of the Osaka and Kishū region is said to appear on rainy nights. The kabukiri-kozō of Shimōsa is met after dark on roads where few people pass. Otherwise the mujina keeps no season and no festival: it turns up when a traveller is alone, when someone is out late, or midway through an ordinary journey, as in the tale of the man who stops at a hut that is really the creature.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Folklorists have handled the Hawaii reports with care. Bob Krauss, a reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser, printed one sighting on 19 May 1959. In a 1981 radio interview Glen Grant, a Hawaiian historian and folklorist, called the story rumor; the person who had reported it then telephoned him with more detail, including red hair. Grant went on to gather other accounts from across the islands. Study of the word itself is a matter of naming: Japanese usage applies mujina to more than one animal, and the overlap is documented rather than settled.

Compare and confuse

Mujina is tangled with tanuki on one side and kitsune on the other. Tanuki, the raccoon dog, looks and acts much like it, but is said to be related to the fox and the dog; foxes share the glow and the trickery. Some districts use mami for badger-like animals or raccoon dogs. The introduced masked palm civet is sometimes meant too. Hearn's "Mujina" is easily confused with badger lore, though its subject is a noppera-bō, a ghost with no face.

Law and persecution

Name confusion once reached a Japanese court. In 1924 a hunter working in Tochigi Prefecture shot a raccoon dog. He took the badger to be the protected animal, since in his district the badger carried the name tanuki, while the ban on hunting tanuki covered the raccoon dog, the animal called tanuki in Tokyo. The Supreme Court accepted that his mistake was honest. The acquittal did not rest on that tangle, however: the judges read the rule about the date of the hunt in his favour.

Today

The word lives in several places at once. Hearn's "Mujina" is still read as a classic of Japanese ghost writing, even though its subject is a faceless figure. In Japan the name attaches to a hot-spring bathhouse, Mujina-no-yu, at Nasu in Tochigi. In Hawaii the 1959 account keeps circulating; the drive-in where it was set has been demolished and a storage business stands there now, and Grant's collected sightings from 'Ewa Beach to Hilo are still cited. The word itself stays unsettled, naming a badger, a raccoon dog and a story creature.

Questions people ask about Mujina

Good reading and sources

• Mujina on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data