Raccoon dog

狸 tanuki

Raccoon dog

The jolly shape-shifting tanuki, often holding sake and a ledger, is a charm for business luck; ta-nuki puns on "surpassing others" (他抜き).

Folklore from the Nara period; the familiar statue is 20th-century Shigaraki (Shiga) ware

Shape-shifting tanuki appear in the Nihon Shoki and later tale collections, and folk stories such as Bunbuku Chagama, the teapot tanuki of Morin-ji in Gunma, made them comic and lucky. The pot-bellied statue with straw hat, sake flask and promissory note was developed by the potter Fujiwara Tetsuzō after he moved to Shigaraki in 1936; a list of eight lucky traits was added in 1952.

Shigaraki tanuki stand outside restaurants and bars across Japan as charms for trade.

Technique catalog · draft for review

Every way to wrap, carry and wear a furoshiki.

The furoshiki.com archive, sliced into annotated steps with plain directions, plus techniques found in research.