A real kitsune?

It usually began with small things. A girl at home went about her work as always — sweeping the floors, cooking rice, arranging firewood at the hearth — but the movement of her hands seemed to lose its former softness, becoming tense, nervous, somehow not her own. Then came the smile — not wide, but too thin, too long, as if it belonged to someone else. As if… animal-like? And then the voice. At first a whisper, then full sentences, spoken in a tone no one had ever heard from her before. Disobedient. Disrespectful. People would say: “kitsu ga tsuita” — “a fox has settled on her.” The kanji 憑 (tsuku) does not quite mean “possession” as in European demonology, but rather “clinging, attaching, hanging upon someone.” The demon does not seize the person’s body by force — it enters into a subtle, deceptive relationship with them.

In the old villages of Japan, possession was not something hidden in the forest’s shadows. It was a language. A way in which a woman’s body could speak what she was not allowed to say. In a community where a daughter did not belong to herself — first to her father, then to her husband, and finally to her son — anger, longing, fear, and defiance had no words of their own. But they could “have a fox.” A girl who did not want to be married off to a man twice her age. A woman who had lost a child. A servant humiliated in the kitchen. A curious, ambitious teenage girl for whom a whole life had been planned: silence and housework, nothing more. Frustration and sorrow began to rise above the smooth surface of obedience to social norms. “The fox speaks through her,” they said. That sentence freed everyone but her: the family from responsibility, the husband from shame, the village from guilt. Possession gave her a voice, but it took away her agency. This is the weight of the phenomenon: kitsune-tsuki was not merely colorful folklore about animals or a charming folk tale for entertainment. It was a mechanism of social tension that had no other outlet.

That is why today’s text will not be about “cute fox girls” from anime or fox demons from dark ukiyo-e prints. Today we will look at kitsune-tsuki not as legend, but as a story about how a community manages the suffering of an individual — at the expense of that individual. From the Heian period, through the courts of the Ashikaga, to peasant homes in San’in, the fox was a figure of the unspoken: rebellion, trauma, jealousy, stigma. In the Meiji era it was replaced by diagnoses — “hysteria,” “neurosis,” and today, in neurology, “anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis” — yet the social structure remained the same. In some regions of northern Japan, even today, when speaking of marriages, someone might quietly say: “but they come from a house where a fox sits.” No one there believes in the old superstitions anymore. In this sense, the question we will ask in this article is not: “Does the demonic fox truly exist?” but rather: “Why was it needed so much — and are we sure it has truly disappeared?”

SCENE I

A humid night

The night was sticky with vapor. From the ponds below, the rice fields exhaled the heat of the day; the earth smelled of moisture, iron, and something sweetly decaying that always hung in the air during summer. Above the road leading to the village hung a first-quarter moon — not the bright, ceremonial one, but uneven, veiled in a thin mist. Elders called such light usagi-tsuki (兎月) — “the rabbit moon,” the kind under which it is hard to tell what belongs to the human world and what does not.

In the house of the Nakayama family, everything was quiet, until suddenly a rough cry rang out. It was not a cry of pain — rather something between laughter and a strangled sob. A terrible, cold sound that enters the body like an icy blade.

On the earthen floor in front of the room sat the father, Shōbei, bent forward as though listening to the ground. He had the face of a man who had seen such things before. Perhaps not often — but enough to recognize them.

Inside, beside an oil lamp, the mother held her daughter — Kiyo — on her lap. The girl was seventeen. Her hair was loose, clumped with sweat. Her eyes were wide open, yet somehow absent, staring into a darkness somewhere beyond the wall. She breathed shallowly and unevenly, like someone who has cried for a very long time.

When she moved, her mother shifted slightly away — not out of fear, but with caution, with that unspoken tension no one names aloud.

“Kiyo…” she rasped. “Kiyo, come back…”

The girl did not answer. Yet her lips moved slightly, as if she were speaking — but the sound was not a word. It was a short, rasping kitsu — a breath drawn from the throat, not the lungs.

The mother looked at her husband. He lowered his gaze.

They knew. Both of them knew.

This was not the first sign. For weeks Kiyo had been eating little, but suddenly she began devouring abura-age (油揚げ) — thin slices of tofu fried in oil — one after another in unnatural quantities. Sometimes she disappeared behind the barn and returned with earth under her fingernails. Sometimes she laughed to herself. Sometimes she spoke to no one.

The old women had been whispering for a long time.

「あれは狐が憑いたんだ。」
(Are wa kitsune ga tsuitan da.)

“A fox has settled on her.”

Which meant only one thing: kitsune-tsuki.

The sliding door opened without a sound. First entered a shugenja (修験者), wearing a worn, smoke-scented robe of dark cloth. Behind him came a miko (巫女) — slender, her face tired from a long journey, her hair tied with a white ribbon (more about miko here: Shinto Priestess Miko – From Powerful Shaman to Part-Time Work). At the shugenja’s belt small suzu bells chimed — bells that call spirits — and in his hand he held hyōshigi: two wooden clappers with which he struck a rhythm, as though tapping a path between two worlds.

They were not shrine priests — those belonged to order, structured prayers, and hierarchy. These two belonged to the borderlands: wanderers of mountain hermit trails, visitors of graveyard hills, appearing where the wind brought things people preferred not to speak of.

They entered quietly, as though the Nakayama house was a place where something best not disturbed was already happening. The shugenja’s face was calm, as if he were watching all this from very far away.

“Leave her,” he said. “If the fox is speaking, we must first hear its voice.”

The mother withdrew her hands. Her fingers trembled.

The shugenja knelt beside the girl. He did not touch her. He simply watched. In old Japanese there was a word, mi (見), which meant both “to see” and “to feel.” That was how he looked — not like a doctor, but like someone searching for the movement of something invisible.

“Who are you?” he said softly to Kiyo.

The girl moved her lips. This time the sound formed into a word, but foreign, as if spoken with someone else’s throat:

- わしは…家の中におる。

(Washi wa*… ie no naka ni oru.)

- “I… am inside the house.”

(*If you know some Japanese, you may wonder why “washi” appears here instead of “watashi.” “Watashi” is modern and very polite, and therefore unsuitable for a demon. “Washi,” on the other hand, is an old, rough pronoun used by elderly men and beings of unnaturally long life — which is why in folklore it is spoken by foxes, tengu, and spirits. In this context, the word signals a non-human voice speaking through the girl’s body, rather than her own consciousness.)

But the intonation was not human. The word ie — “house” — was stretched unnaturally long, like a hide being pulled taut over a drum. The mother began to sob. The father clenched his hands in helplessness.

The shugenja nodded. He did not react with fear. Nor was there any religious fervor in his voice. Only sober recognition.

“This house,” he said, “is not yours. Tell me what you want.”

This time the reply came instantly, like a nerve impulse:

— Atsui. (“Hot.”)

And the girl’s body tensed suddenly, as though something were trying to tear itself out of her chest. The shugenja turned to the father.

  - "Bring the dog.”

The father paled. Everyone knew: the dog is a mirror for the fox. The fox fears the dog, because the dog sees what humans prefer not to see.

“If this is illness,” said the shugenja quietly, “the dog will do nothing. If it is a fox — it may leave. Though perhaps not immediately.”

Silence fell in the room, heavy as the night air. Kiyo began to tremble, but not with cold.
From behind the paper wall came the sound of a bark. The mother covered her mouth.
The shugenja did not look away. He knew it was not just about the fox. It was about the village, the neighbors, about what people would say. For sometimes the fox did not enter a person. Sometimes it was the village that placed the fox inside the person — the way one inserts a knife into a wound, to give the wound a name. The shugenja knew he would not be able to help the girl, but the ritual had to be performed nonetheless. Not for her.
For the others…

The Fox in Japanese Culture

(About kitsune — both the animal and the yōkai — we wrote in separate articles here:
Japanese Kitsune – Demonic and Sacred Foxes Manipulating the Lives of Unaware Humans
"Foxfires" in Old Edo – A Nocturnal Gathering of Kitsune in Hiroshige’s Ukiyo-e)

In Japan, the fox has long occupied spaces that do not belong entirely either to humans or to the wild. It appears where cultivated fields end and the forest begins; along ridges between paddies, by irrigation channels, at dusk, when the village grows quiet but the world has not yet fallen asleep. It is a space of transition — a boundary called ma in Japanese: a momentary suspension between one state and another. The fox embodies precisely this suspension.

Even the word kitsune carries this ambiguity. In folklore it is sometimes explained as kitsu-ne — “come, sleep with me”: an echo of tales of fox women who loved and lived with humans (such as the fox wife of Abe no Seibei — more here: The Sorcerer at the Heian Emperor's Court: Abe no Seimei, Master of Onmyōdō). Linguists, however, point out that a more likely origin is the old sound imagined as a fox’s bark — kitsu. It sounds like something between a hiss and a short, tense exhalation.

In the Japanese landscape, the fox was for a long time not seen as dangerous. Rather, as an ally — it devoured the rodents that destroyed rice. Thus it became associated with plenty and fertility. For this reason, at shrines dedicated to the rice deity Inari, stone foxes stand guard. They hold in their mouths keys to the granary or small jewels — symbols of protection over the household and the harvest. In this understanding, the fox is not a god, but a messenger, a mediator between the world of humans and the forces that allow grain to grow.

Yet this bright face of the fox was never the only one. Its place “between” meant it could deceive as easily as protect. The Japanese long believed that the fox could take human form. Most often — that of a woman. Sometimes gentle, warm, loving. Sometimes unsettlingly beautiful, too intelligent to trust completely. This ambivalence grew stronger when stories from the continent arrived — tales of Chinese fox sorceresses who led kings to ruin, and Korean gumiho (구미호) that drained the life from men. Japanese imagination absorbed these images but reshaped them in its own way: the fox remained a being of the threshold — only now that threshold had become more uncertain, more ambiguous, deeper.

From then on, in Japanese stories, the fox stands simultaneously at the threshold of the house and the edge of the forest, halfway between protective spirit and temptress, between illusion and care. It is not the embodiment of good or evil. It is the symbol of what is changeable — ordinary and extraordinary at once — of what may happen in a single moment, when a person crossing the border between fields suddenly feels someone walking one step behind them.

Kitsune-tsuki — What Does It Mean to Be Possessed by a Fox?

To understand kitsune-tsuki, one must pause at the verb used in Japanese to describe possession. It is not said that a spirit enters a person, as in European or Middle Eastern demonology. The word used is tsuku, written with the character 憑, meaning to cling, to lean, to adhere. The fox does not “inhabit” the human. It sticks to the inside — to the breath, to the thoughts, to what one carries within but does not speak of. It is a state rather than an act; a relationship, not a takeover.

Thus the village would say:

“The fox has touched her.”

Not: “She is evil,” but: “She is being carried by something that came from outside.”

This state was recognized subtly, by observing the body’s signals. First, the expression changed — the face behaved as though someone were lightly pulling thin threads beneath the skin. The corners of the mouth lifted into a half-smile, not fully human. The eyes did not look at the person, but past, over their shoulder. They would say:

- 目がこっちに来んぞ。
(Me ga kocchi ni kon zo.)

- “She isn’t seeing us directly.”

Over time, the voice changed. A girl who had always spoken softly might suddenly speak in an old, strange dialect used several generations earlier. Or, conversely — she might speak sweetly, softly, seductively. This was the sign that something else was speaking through her.

It was also believed that the fox had a body — not the whole animal, but a small, hard lump beneath the skin. Someone would feel it, touch it, and it would slip away under their fingers, as if it moved with a life of its own. Today, psychiatrists might call it somatic tension. There, it was a presence.

The most haunting signs were changes in appetite. A girl might suddenly eat bowl after bowl of fried tofu or sweet beans, as if eating for two. People would say (sometimes jokingly — it did not necessarily have to be a “real” possession): “The fox is hungry.”

And then there were the dogs. The village believed that the dog sees the truth the human eye cannot catch. If a dog began to growl at someone “for no reason,” it was a thing as weighty as a sentence. For a dog does not mistake the boundary between worlds.

Why, then, did kitsune-tsuki most often concern women? There is nothing “mystically feminine” about it. What there is, instead, is a social construction of suffering — one, regrettably, not so far from our European tradition.

A woman in an Edo-period Japanese village was someone suspended between the home she came from and the home into which she was brought after marriage. Her body, her labor, her obedience were elements of exchange between families. Anthropology calls this a “crossing of the identity threshold” — a person is shifted into a place that is not yet theirs and may never fully become so.

If a young woman could not find her way in this new space, she could not say so directly. She lacked the language with which to say “it is too tight for me,” “it feels foreign,” “I am afraid.” Crying was improper. Defiance was punished. Silence was required (read more about the life of a samurai wife: The Invisible Woman – Life as a Samurai’s Wife).

The fox provided a language that circumvented the prohibition. One could say: “It is not her. The fox is holding her.” And then everything was at once true and left unsaid. The fox became the voice of a tension the village perceived but did not wish to name. And the exorcism — however it was performed — was usually not for her. It was for the neighbors. For order. For the community that had to go on living as it had lived. Thus kitsune-tsuki is not a story about an animal spirit that seized a woman. It is a story about a woman who could not say “I” — so someone else said it for her.

Between Ritual, Theater, and Illness

When, in the Heian period, the “Nihon ryōiki” was being compiled — the first collection of miraculous tales written down by monks — Japan was only just learning to distinguish the boundaries between what we now call the “psyche” and the “spiritual.” In these texts, the fox is not yet a cunning animal or a demon. It is a whisper of memory — a voice that appears where a person cannot cope with an emotion: grief for a deceased wife, the shame of guilt, choking melancholy and sorrow. In the moralizing setsuwa (説話, medieval anecdotes), the “possessed” woman begins to speak a truth that no one dared to utter. The fox speaks for her precisely when it would not have been proper for her to speak the words herself.

This is why the fox was, from the beginning, bound to what is hidden. It did not “enter” a person as a demon in Christian iconography does — it adhered, it “sat” on the voice, on the breath, on the gestures. In the language it was called tsuku — “to cling,” “to settle on someone like a shadow.” And so kitsune-tsuki did not mean the incursion of an alien will, but rather a shift in balance: the emergence of something that had already been within the person, yet buried too deeply to be spoken without a mask.

This tension between openness and concealment became the foundation of nō theater. In nō, the fox does not enter the stage as an animal. It appears as a sudden change of rhythm. The fan drops a fraction lower, the foot slides more slowly, the voice begins to draw out the final vowel. The audience needs no explanation — it knows this is the moment when a human brushes against the supernatural / the subconscious. Kyōgen, the comedic “counterpart” to nō, reverses this gesture: the fox can be an excuse, a comic justification, a way to evade blame. Where nō lays bare what is painful, kyōgen exposes what is social — mechanisms of prestige, jealousy, deceit.

And yet it was only the Edo period that made kitsune-tsuki an everyday phenomenon. That was when the cult of Inari — the deity of rice and abundance — flourished, and its messenger became the fox. Fox figurines appeared in shrines, by roadsides, on rooftops. The fox no longer belonged to the wild — it inhabited village and city alike, like an echo of human desires. It also began to arouse fear. Where wealth appears, suspicion follows. In western Japan arose the notion of kitsune-mochi — families said to “keep a fox,” that wealth had come to them “by unclean means.” A rumor sufficed. A glance sufficed. Stigmatization required no proof.

In those villages, possession was often a language for conflicts that could not be expressed directly. A daughter begins “speaking with the fox’s voice”? It may mean rebellion against an imposed marriage, despair after a brother’s death, fear of a role she does not want to accept. Women — those of whom silence and obedience were expected — were especially prone to become the “place” where the fox settled. Their bodies were less “their own” than men’s bodies: they belonged to the household, to the lineage, to the community. Possession was often the only form of protest that could not be named protest.

When, in the Meiji era, Western medicine entered Japan, the fox was moved from fields and theaters into neurologists’ offices. Diagnoses were made of hysteria, dissociative disorders, “alopecanthropy” — a term coined by the German physician studying cases in Shimane, Erwin von Bälz. But the fact that the fox ceased to be listed in textbooks did not mean it ceased to exist. What had earlier been called possession began to be called neurosis. Only the social weight remained. Families labeled as kitsune-mochi were still, in the 1930s, having difficulty arranging marriages, and “possessed” women were shut in rooms for many months. Not because people believed the fox was truly there. But because everyone believed someone else might believe it.

Thus kitsune-tsuki is not merely a folk belief, nor merely a psychological condition, nor merely a literary motif. It is a language of social tension, a way in which the community coped with what it could not speak directly.

Kitsune-mochi – Families Marked by the Fox

If, in stories of kitsune-tsuki, we usually focus on the individual — the girl who trembles, speaks in another voice, and whose gaze “does not return” — in the case of kitsune-mochi, something far larger is at stake. Here, the fox does not enter a person. The fox remains in the family. In the surname. In the memory of others. In the glances that fall silent when someone from that family enters the room. This is no longer a story about a spirit. It is a story about society — about how a community can create its own demon and feed it across generations.

The San’in region — Izumo, Hōki, Oki — lived for centuries under the shadow of such families. There, as Nomura Akira noted in his field research from the 1950s and 60s, the word kitsune-mochi (“one who keeps a fox”) meant “one to be avoided.” Officially, no one believed in the fox anymore. Schools taught biology, American modernity crackled over the radio. And yet — on wedding days, during harvest, at funerals — in those moments when the community looked at itself in full truth — the division remained.

Nomura observed that this was not a “surviving superstition,” but a social system. In earlier times, these families were often connected to local cults, to female lines of shamans or priestesses — miko, who mediated between the world of humans and the world of kami. These women were needed. They were called when grain would not sprout, when a child would not speak, when someone dreamed too heavily. But as rituals were gradually centralized into shrines and religious authority became institutional, these old intermediaries became suspect. Their knowledge grew “too old,” their role “too feminine.”

Later, when some of these families prospered — through trade, land leasing, or advantageous marriages — the old shadow returned. The fox became a word for jealousy. “They have a fox,” people said. “It brings them wealth.”

And if someone becomes wealthy “too quickly” in the eyes of the community, it cannot be because of work, cleverness, or simple luck. There must be a secret. Thus the fox ceased to be a spirit and became an argument.

And here lies the core — not in belief, but in the mechanism of social stigma. In San’in, an informal division arose between the “ordinary” and the “unclean.” The former were “clean”; the latter were “with the fox.” There were no documents, lists, or laws. It was enough that the village remembered.

Marriage bans were never spoken aloud. It was simply that, when a son from a “normal” family wished to marry a daughter from an “unclean” one, there came: silence heavy with reproach, gentle discouragement, mothers crying, uncles visiting, sudden conversations about “responsibility to the ancestors.” No one ever said “no.” And yet everything was “no.” This was caste without law, violence without a hand, condemnation without a voice.

Nomura observed that when asked whether they believed in kitsune-tsuki, villagers answered:

“Oh no, no one believes in that anymore. Those are old things.”

But when asked: “Would you marry someone from that house?” — silence.

This is the double structure of Japanese social psychology: tatemae — what is said publicly,
and honne — what is known and felt, but left unspoken. In this sense, kitsune-mochi is not a belief, but a tool. The fox becomes the figure of what the community must cast outside itself in order to remain whole. It is a sacrifice rendered by the community — of an individual or a family — to preserve social harmony.

The one “who has a fox” may be anyone who deviates: too proud, too independent, too feminine, too wealthy, too withdrawn. The fox settles where the village needs a culprit.
And so possession does not begin in the person, but in the eyes of others.

The Psychology of Kitsune-tsuki

The phenomenon of kitsune-tsuki exists at the intersection of individual experience and group dynamics. In rural Japanese communities, especially before the 20th century, emotions were not considered entirely private. Feelings of anger, frustration, or burden did not “belong” to a single person, but to the network of relations between households (ie). When that balance was disturbed, the community needed a way to name the tension and anchor it in a familiar pattern. Possession by the fox functioned as a language that allowed crisis to be expressed — without assigning guilt to any individual.

This is why records so often emphasize that the “possessed” person says things that she “would not normally say.” This does not mean theatrical performance. It is a mechanism that psychology today would call dissociation or displaced affect — traumatic or unspeakable content finding a channel of expression through the adoption of a culturally recognizable role. In anthropological terms, we speak of a “possession script” — a culturally available behavioral transformation that grants temporary freedom from norms.

It is crucial that this phenomenon affected mainly women. Not because they were “more vulnerable,” but because their position in the social structure was most restricted — and thus generated the greatest internal conflict. They were expected to obey, to be silent, to submit to family decisions. Internal conflict — concerning marriage, work, or relations in the husband’s household — could not be spoken aloud. Kitsune-tsuki allowed it to surface while temporarily suspending responsibility: one could say that “the fox speaks,” and not the person herself. In this sense, it was a socially permitted breach of the norm.

An important part of this system was status compensation. Families who distinguished themselves by wealth, economic autonomy, or firm independence could be marked as “those who have a fox.” This mark did not need to be voiced. A single phrase sufficed: iegara ga warui — “the lineage is questionable.” In this way, status conflict was displaced to the symbolic level, and jealousy or economic tension acquired a religious-social justification.

From this perspective, kitsune-tsuki is not only a religious phenomenon, but also a tool for regulating emotions, releasing tension, and preserving hierarchy. It is a mechanism that allows the community to remain in harmony — even when the cost of that harmony is borne by the individual.

Political Possession – A Fox at the Shōgun’s Court

During the Muromachi period, the body of the ruler was understood as part of the state order. The illness of the shōgun was not regarded as a private health matter, but as a sign of a disturbance in political balance. In this context, kitsune-tsuki could become a tool for interpreting crisis — a phenomenon that not only expressed tension, but organized it and endowed it with meaning in a ritual-religious language. This explains why possession appears not only in village life, but also at the highest levels of power.

Ashikaga Yoshimochi (1420)

In the year 1420, shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimochi suddenly fell ill. Sources such as the Kanmon nikki and Yasutomi-ki describe his condition as progressive weakness, loss of appetite, and episodes of disturbed consciousness. In the court record appears the expression 狐憑き (kitsune-tsuki) — indicating that the illness was interpreted within the belief system of possession.

What followed is particularly significant. The illness became the basis for political action:

 - the court physician Takama was accused of causing the possession through magical practices,

 - an onmyōdō master named Sadamune was also detained,

 - some monks and physicians associated with this circle were removed or exiled.

In this way, possession became a framework for interpreting factional conflict. To accuse someone of “sending a fox” meant accusing them of a ritual attack — a form of political struggle articulated through religious and spiritual language. When the shōgun’s condition improved, the personal arrangement at court shifted accordingly, suggesting that the process of “healing” served to restore political balance as much as physical health.

The Wife of Ashikaga Yoshinori (1433)

In 1433, the behavior of the wife of shōgun Ashikaga Yoshinori caused alarm and was recorded in chronicles as a case of kitsune-tsuki. The sources note sudden fits of laughter, silence, refusal of food, and a strong fearful reaction to dogs. Unlike in Yoshimochi’s case, suspicion was not directed toward specific political rivals. Interpretation centered on her living environment.

At the shōgun’s court, women lived under strict control: in a hierarchical structure where their position depended on fertility, silence, and absolute submission. Such conditions fostered internal tensions that could not be expressed openly. In this context, kitsune-tsuki functioned as a culturally recognized form of emotional crisis.

The exorcisms performed at her bedside — monks’ prayers, onmyōji rituals, fumigation with herbs — were meant primarily to restore harmony within the court, not to resolve the personal suffering of the individual. This means that the woman’s body functioned as a space where disorder in social relations was revealed and regulated.

In medieval Japan, illness was not understood as a biological process isolated within the individual body. It was seen as a disturbance of harmony between people, spirits, and cosmic order. Therefore, in both Yoshimochi’s case and that of Yoshinori’s wife, the reaction of those around them was systemic, not medical in the modern sense. Kitsune-tsuki did not mean “oddity,” but a state indicating that balance in political or social relations required restoration.

What Remains of the Fox in Today’s Japan?

Although the era in which the “fox” held real ritual and social force belongs to the past, its traces continue in three important areas: medicine, popular culture, and the social structures of rural Japan.

In psychiatry and neurology today, there are cases which, though not identified as “fox possession,” in many ways correspond to older interpretations (e.g., anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis). In Japan, these cases are sometimes discussed in relation to the tradition of “fox possession,” although of course contemporary medicine no longer explains them in such terms.

In such cases, neurological and psychiatric symptoms — altered consciousness, involuntary movements, changes in behavior — resemble those once described as “the fox has attached itself.” Although the explanatory framework today is different (autoimmune rather than spiritual), old folklore shows how people sought meaning for behaviors that did not fit known patterns. We might say that contemporary medicine is, in effect, reinterpreting the same symptoms: less through spirits, more through immune systems.

On the other hand, the fox remains vividly alive in popular culture — in anime, manga, video games, and literature (and even in the logo of our modest site). Modern media use the kitsune as a figure at the border of human and animal, often linked to magic, transformation, illusion. The yōkai-fox appears in works such as Naruto and One Piece. In this sense, the fox is no longer merely a remnant of folk belief: it is a symbol of longing for the “unseen,” for the boundary between the real and the possible, for the thing that escapes definition. Thus the fox again becomes a carrier of metaphorical meanings: of control, transformation, otherness.

Finally, the third domain — rural communities of northern Japan — where, although official belief in fox possession has long since been relegated to the category of folklore, a quiet trace of the superstition remains. Social research shows that in some regions, taboos associated with genealogy, “purity of the house,” and marriage decisions still operate — even though no one says anymore that “a fox lives” in someone’s home. The community does not need to actively believe in the fox in order to apply the mechanism that once had its justification in ritual. The mechanism still functions.

Thus the fox has not vanished. It has changed its form. It has become a metaphor, a diagnosis, a pop-cultural figure, and a shadow of social memory. And this means that its presence is today both less visible — and far deeper — than when it was simply “the spirit of a single household.”

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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