Old SymbolsWhere every symbol began

Plate 1 A fox sitting upright in profile, ears pricked, its thick tail curving up behind it, a small flame of foxfire floating before its nose

Kitsune (fox)

The fox of Japanese folklore: a shape-shifter that takes a woman’s form, possesses people and lights foxfire. In Shinto the fox belongs to Inari, the kami of rice, and pairs of stone foxes guard Inari’s shrines.

Yōkai and creatures of Japanese folklore. Also called fox spirit, inari fox, japanese fox, kitsune, kitsune mask, kitsune meaning, nine tailed fox japanese.

Meaning

Kitsune is the Japanese word for the fox. In the folklore Henri Joly gathered in 1908, a fox a hundred years old can possess people or take the form of a woman, and at a thousand it turns white or golden and grows nine tails. The fox is also part of the cult of Inari, the kami of rice and harvest: Kokugakuin University’s Encyclopedia of Shinto counts more than 30,000 shrines to Inari, one of the most popular objects of devotion in Japan, and Jinja Honchō, the association of Shinto shrines, says that some shrines keep statues of the animals of their kami, foxes among them, as guardians that keep evil out. The fox belongs today to Shinto, through Inari’s shrines, and to Japan’s folk tales and yōkai pictures.

Origin and history

Belief in the fox’s magic came from China. Joly dates it to about the tenth century; Basil Hall Chamberlain, in 1905, to the early Middle Ages, with one or two magic foxes already in the Uji shūi, a story book of the eleventh century. Lafcadio Hearn, writing after fourteen months in Izumo, adds that the fox as a supernatural being did not reach Japan before the tenth or eleventh century, and that in all the grounds of Kitzuki, which he calls the oldest Shinto shrine in Japan, there was no image of a fox. The Encyclopedia of Shinto explains how the fox came to Inari. The places where the mountain kami was welcomed in spring are called “fox mounds”, and the kami was believed to ride down to the rice paddies led by a fox. One of Inari’s names, Miketsukami, sounds the same as the characters for “three fox kami”, which, the encyclopedia says, in effect brought fox kami into existence.

Inari’s foxes at the shrine

Hearn found stone foxes everywhere he travelled: a pair facing each other before some small roadside shrine, and at great shrines thousands of them in tiers. The fox, he wrote, was sacred to Inari as the tortoise is to Kompira and the rat to Daikoku, and some foxes held keys in their mouths, because Inari gives wealth. At one Inari temple near Yokohama he walked up through a succession of torii with a pair of foxes before each, and found pieces of coloured cloth tied round the foxes’ necks as offerings. He never saw an image of Inari himself in any Inari temple. Behind many shrines was a round hole for the invisible fox, O-Kitsune-San, with tofu and rice left inside. Joly describes the stone foxes at Inari’s gates as seated, with or without small bronze bells, and calls the Inari fox the one well-disposed fox, perhaps because the messenger of the god of rice had to be. At Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, the Encyclopedia of Shinto notes, there is a shrine, the Myōbusha (or Byakkosha), where fox spirits are worshipped.

Shape-shifters, possession and foxfire

In the beliefs Hearn recorded in Izumo, all foxes have supernatural power, and there are good foxes and bad. The Inari fox is good. The wild fox (nogitsune) is a wizard that deceives by enchantment and can take any shape. The worst is the man-fox (ninko or hito-kitsune), no bigger than a weasel, the fox of possession: it lives in a household that feeds it and brings it prosperity, and brings misfortune and ruined crops if offended. Chamberlain gives a long article to fox possession, kitsune-tsuki, and quotes Dr. Baelz of the Imperial University calling it a nervous disorder or delusion not uncommonly seen in Japan; the Encyclopedia of Shinto lists foxes among the animal spirits of tsukimono, spirit possession. Joly adds the fox’s smaller tricks: disguising itself as a priest, drumming on its belly like the Tanuki (raccoon dog), and lighting kitsune-bi, the fox fire. The National Diet Library describes kitsunebi as eerie lights said to be lit by foxes: on New Year’s Eve, when the foxes of the whole Kantō region were said to gather at Ōji Inari Shrine in Edo, villagers read the next year’s harvest from them.

Nine tails and other stories

The nine-tailed fox is a fox a thousand years old, Joly records. The best known is Tamamo-no-mae, whose story the National Diet Library tells: she seemed a beautiful woman but was a nine-tailed fox with golden fur, who deceived emperors in ancient China and Emperor Toba in Japan, until the onmyōji Abe-no-Yasunari vanquished her and she became the sesshō-seki, the killing stone, in Nasuno, in present-day Tochigi Prefecture. Joly names other subjects of art: Kuzunoha, shown as a fox nursing a baby with a brush in its mouth, and the kitsune no yomeiri, the foxes’ wedding, when the sun shines through the rain and the bride is carried to her husband’s house.

Fox masks on the stage

In the kyōgen play Tsurigitsune (Fox Trapping) the fox is played in a fox mask and costume. The JAANUS dictionary of Japanese art describes masks that range from fierce and realistic, with a protruding snout, a tongue between sharp teeth and a lower jaw that moves, to masks with more human features and a wide smiling mouth. The first half of the play has its own mask, Hakuzōsu, for the fox disguised as the trapper’s uncle.

Often confused with

The stone foxes at Inari shrines stand where most shrines have komainu, the lion-like guardian dogs. Jinja Honchō describes both as guardians: the koma inu, mythological creatures that look a little like lions, are the commonest pair, and some shrines have the animals of their own kami instead, such as foxes, wolves or monkeys. The fox of Japanese folklore is a different animal from the fox in other traditions, though the belief came from China.

See also

Bakeneko and nekomata (cat yōkai), Komainu (guardian lion-dogs), Komainu (guardian lion-dogs), Jorōgumo (spider woman), Tengu, Kappa.

Sources

  1. Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art (1908), Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art: A Description of Historical Episodes, Legendary Characters, Folk-lore, Myths, Religious Symbolism Illustrated in the Arts of Old Japan, London: John Lane, 1908, John Lane (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), entry 198, Fox
  2. Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, first series (1894), Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, first series, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1894 (Project Gutenberg ebook 8130), Project Gutenberg, chapter 15, “Kitsune”, sections 1–3
  3. Inari Shinkō (Encyclopedia of Shinto), Encyclopedia of Shinto, Kokugakuin University, “Inari Shinkō”, Kokugakuin University, article text
  4. Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese (1905), Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, fifth edition, London: John Murray, 1905, John Murray (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), “Demoniacal Possession”, pp. 115–116
  5. Tsukimono (Encyclopedia of Shinto), Encyclopedia of Shinto, Kokugakuin University, “Tsukimono”, Kokugakuin University, article text
  6. TORIYAMA Sekien’s Illustrated Night Parade of the Demon Horde (NDL Image Bank), National Diet Library, NDL Image Bank, Columns: “TORIYAMA Sekien’s Illustrated Night Parade of the Demon Horde”, National Diet Library, Japan, “Kitsunebi” and “Tamamonomae and the sessho-seki”
  7. kitsune (JAANUS), JAANUS: Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System, “kitsune 狐”, JAANUS (Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System), entry text
  8. Jinja (Jinja Honchō), Jinja Honchō (Association of Shinto Shrines), “Jinja” (English pamphlet), Jinja Honchō, pamphlet text

The same shape elsewhere

Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research

Added .

Report a problem

Please don’t include personal details.