Over the course of modernization and translation, fox folklore
has gotten a bit garbled. Here are a few common misperceptions about
are associated with different elements.
spirits are a species separate from animal foxes.
are inherently female.
can transform into any kind of person, animal, or object.
half-human forms look like a human with fox ears and a fox tail.
fox gains tails as a sign of spiritual advancement or as a reward
for great deeds done.
Foxes store power in their tails.
child of a fox and a human is a half-fox.
Japanese, a fox's bark is written, "Kitsu! Kitsu!"
Note: This page changes frequently as I learn more about
foxes. If something here sounds wrong to you, and you have a scholarly
or folkloric (i.e., non-anime, non-Hong Kong cinema, non-RPG, non-gaijin-medium-who's-in-touch-with-kitsune)
source that says something different from what I've said here, please
And when you email me, please tell me your source. Emailing
me to say that something on my page is wrong is useless unless you
include a) what you think is wrong, and b) what your source is.
Foxes are associated with different elements.
No, no, no, no, no. Foxes are in no way, shape, or form any kind of elemental
creature, nor are there different kinds of foxes for different elements. Various
texts may assign elements to foxes, but this is rather like the 18th-century
doctor ascribing a particular balance of the four humors to a particular animalan
attempt at description rather than a deep spiritual linkage.
The belief that foxes are divided into thirteen clans, each corresponding to
one of the lower Japanese elements, comes from a single reference in Kitsune:
Japan's Fox of Mystery, Romance & Humor:
According to a certain kannagi (maiden of the shrine who divines things,
besides having other duties), there are 13 kinds of foxes with their different
methods of witchery, such as celestial foxes, earthly foxes, black foxes,
white foxes, and so forth.
This is a belief attributed to a single source, a single Japanese shrine maiden.
It doesn't show up in any other source, Japanese or Chinese. In fact, the Chinese
gentleman scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries, men who loved to theorize
about fox spirits, said absolutely nothing in the translated literature about
foxes having any kind of relationship with the elements.
However, as Karen Smyers shows in The Fox and the Jewel,
Inari worship is intensely personal. Small sects with unorthodox
takes on Inari and kitsune are a regular feature of any shrine's
life. When Kiyoshi Nozaki, the author of Kitsune, visited
a shrine to Inari, he may have found just such a sect centered on
a shrine maiden. However, her beliefs never made it into the mainstream
Another problem with the idea that foxes are divided into 13 groups is that
no such division appears in any Asian culture. Korean fox spirits are all "kumiho,"
"nine-tailed foxes." Chinese fox spirits are all "huli jing," "exquisite foxes."
A few are also "huxian," "transcendental foxes," but that's a marker of spiritual
growth similar to the English terms "Saint" or "Blessed," not a designation
of a completely different kind of fox. Japanese fox spirits are divided into
the foxes who serve Inari, the myobu, and the wild foxes or "field foxes," the
nogitsune; the myobu have ranks, but the nogitsune aren't divided any further.
If there were generally believed to be 13 types of foxes, elementally aligned
or not, they'd have names, and they'd show up in other stories.
Fox spirits are a species separate from animal foxes.
All foxesevery single fox ever born, from the foxes in the wilds of Japan
to the foxes creeping about your back yard at night to the skull that used to
be a fox that now sits on a fox-kin's altarhave the potential to become
fox spirits. The sole distinction between an ordinary fox and a fox "spirit"
Throughout China and Japan, there is (was?) a belief that all things accrue
power with age. Humans become wiser and more skilled; wines become stronger;
places become more imbued with tradition; ritual objects become more holy. Animals,
if they live long enough, develop magical skills and human intelligence. Foxes,
already imbued with a little more intelligence than mere animals should have,
are specialists in longevity.* According to Feng
Menglong, who quotes from a lost source of the third or fourth century:
At fifty years of age the fox can turn into a human; at a hundred it can
know something a thousand miles away; at a thousand years it can communicate
Tales of foxes knowing something a thousand miles away are uncommon. It's easier
to find stories of two-hundred-year-old foxes who barely know what's going on
under their own powdered noses; the foxes whose story Feng goes on to tell are
all several hundred years old, and most of them show the wisdom and foreknowledge
of an overripe apricot. However, the general pattern holds true in all stories
where a fox's age is given: A fox develops or learns the ability to transform
itself after living fifty or a hundred years, and continues to grow in power
As you can see, the term "fox spirit" is a misnomer. It is an English-language
invention with scant parallels in actual Asian terms for foxes with magical
powers. In Korea, fox "spirits" are "nine-tailed foxes";
in China, they are "exquisite foxes" or "transcendental foxes";
in Japan, they are merely "foxes," or perhaps "white foxes"
or "wild foxes." The Japanese alsorarelycall "spirit"
foxes youko, or you foxes. You is a complex term that means
that something has been touched by the world of magic and the spirit, not necessarily
in a good way; it tends to be translated as "ghost" or "demon"
or "fairy." Since the Asian concept of the spirit world is more permeable
than the European concept, a creature that is now a ghost-demon-fairy-spirit
may well have been born a perfectly ordinary animal.
* So are creatures like the carp and the tortoise, which have no natural lifespan
and grow bigger and more powerful as they age. Why the fox, a creature that
ages normally and rarely lives past six in the wild, was chosen as an exemplar
of long life is a mystery.
Foxes are inherently female.
With the total absence of male foxes from popular translated tales,
it's easy to assume that all foxes are female. Fortunately for the
perpetuation of the race, this is untrue. Male foxes are earnest
they can also be lovers, but this is less common than you might
think, since they prefer women to men. (Chinese and Japanese folktales
like to keep seductive strangers away from the womenfolk. When foxes
are involved, they like to keep women out of the protagonist's role
entirely.) They can, upon occasion, be rapists.
The only thing male foxes can't do that vixens can is to marry into
a human family.
Foxes are strongly associated with yin, the cold, dark, feminine principle.
One text states that because they are nocturnal, they are rarely
touched by the sun's aging rays, and this is why they are so long-lived;
another says that because foxes are inherently yin, they are also
inherently feminine. "Feminine" isn't the same as "female,"
though. (This also appears to be a minority opinion, since most
male foxes aren't depicted as being feminine.)
Foxes can transform into any kind of person, animal, or object.
Japanese foxes can, indeed, change themselves into anything, from
an old man to a young beauty to a statue of the Buddha to an impossibly
tall cedar tree. One fox even transforms itself into a second moon.
Foxes seem to prefer to be human, with the form of statues of Kuan
Yin or Buddha a distant second, and all other forms taking a far,
far third. I've found only one story in which a fox takes on the
form of another animal. The transformation doesn't seem to be easythe
effort to blip between several forms overcomes the less-than-bright
fox who tries itand folklore takes a dim view of foxes who
change into nonhuman forms. In every story I've found so far, foxes
who take on nonhuman forms are exposed and forced to flee, or are
caught and killed... and sometimes eaten.
In China, foxes can transform themselves into any kind of human
being, provided they have the spiritual cultivation or power to
take on a particular form. They may also be able to take on the
form of images of Kuan Yin. They never change into other objects
or animals, though. This is because Chinese foxes' transformations
are part of their attempts to gain enlightenment or immortality;
humans hold the key to both, so futzing around dressed like a cat
or a gopher won't help the fox.
Foxes' half-human forms look like a human with fox ears and
a fox tail.
Foxes traditionally have three forms:
- A normal fox, possibly with extra tails.
- A human-sized, bipedal fox dressed in human clothing. This form
is shown frequently in pictures, but is never described in stories.
However, phrases like "He looked at her and saw that she
was a fox" may mean that the human saw through the human
illusion to the half-fox form. This is just conjecture, though.
What is clearly part of the tradition is that if a fox in human
form slowly transforms back into a fox (rather than being startled,
which causes an instantaneous transformation), she passes through
the half-fox form. This is depicted in the story of Kuzunoha,
who has to write her final message to her husband with the brush
clenched in her teeth because her hands have turned back into
- A normal human. The human occasionally has a fox attribute which
causes him or her to be discovered. Usually, the attribute is
a tail. Occasionally, the fox's feet remain paws, as in the story
of Daji, an imperial concubine who wrapped bandages around her
tiny feet to hide them and thus started the fashion of footbinding.
In at least one story, a woman knows for certain that her lover
is a fox because his penis looks like a fox's. And upon occasion,
a fox is covered beneath its clothes in soft down, or even, if
it's careless about its transformation, in fox fur. However, foxes
do not sport fox ears, fox eyes, unusual coloration, or any other
Foxes' human faces are often triangular, like a real fox's, and
this attribute sometimes suggests that the human is in fact a fox
in disguise. However, ordinary humans can also have this facial
A fox gains tails as a sign of spiritual advancement or as a
reward for great deeds done.
This remarkably tenacious idea came from a series of fantasy novels by Mercedes Lackey, who based her version of the kitsune on a MU*. It's compelling and has a certain internal consistency, but it's as folklorically accurate as anything else you'll learn on a MU*.
In some real traditions, foxes gain tails with age, at the rate
of one per century. (In these traditions, one-, five-, seven-, and
nine-tailed foxes are common, but not the other possible numbers
of tails.) In other traditions, foxes stay one-tailed until they
are ready to become nine-tailed foxes. Nine-tailed foxes are universally
considered powerfulthe Platonic form of a spirit fox, so to
speak. There are no genuine stories that I know of involving a ten-tailed
fox, and no support for the idea that tails are badges of accomplishment.
Foxes store power in their tails.
This idea comes from the fact that a fox's powers increase as its
number of tails increases. It's an appealing idea, but inaccurate.
A fox's powers increase as its age increases, and the number of
its tails also increase as a sign of age, but the two aren't directly
related. It's like saying that humans store their intelligence in
their gray hair.
So where do foxes store their power? In many stories, nowhere.
Foxes' power derives from their ch'i or qi, the "lifeforce"
that pervades all things. Like Taoist masters, foxes who have cultivated
their ch'i contain uncommon amounts of ch'i in their bodies and
can also affect the ch'i of the world around them. There's no one
source of power, unless you consider the soul a source.
In other stories, all of which are Japanese, foxes store their
power in the white balls they play with. These "wish-fulfilling
jewels" contain their powers in the same way as a dragon's
pearl, and capturing a kitsune's ball puts it in your power. Not
all stories agree on the nature of kitsunes' balls, though; some
are just toys, or objects that contain some power but don't have
enough power to control the kitsune who made them. To read more
about wish-fulfilling jewels, check out The Fox and the Jewel:
Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship,
by Karen Smyers.
The child of a fox and a human is a half-fox.
A fox's child by her human husband is human, plain and simplebut not boring. Foxes' human children have unusual
qualities. In both China and Japan, they are often
"big men," physically or culturallythat is, they're huge and
strong, or politically and socially important, or both.* Sometimes
their fox mothers teach them magic, or they inherit magic in their
blood; a few Japanese sorcerors were descended from foxes.
There's also a grab bag of traits they can have to show their fox
ancestry. For example, in one Chinese story, a fox's human daughter
is beautiful, kind, skillful, and in every way a perfect wifeexcept
that she laughs all the time. In a version of "Kuzunoha," the fox-wife
Kuzunoha sees her son eating beetles, and laments that he has inherited
her animal blood. (Real foxes do eat beetles.) It seems that the
people telling fox stories agreed that the child of a human and
a fox had to be touched in some way, but they don't agree on exactly
how the child is touched, or perhaps each offspring of a fox is
To read one story of a Japanese fox's human child, check out the story "Come
and Sleep." At the end is the tale of Kitsune's granddaughter.
* The person who first asked me about foxes' children pointed out
that it's ironic that foxes' children can be strong, since foxes
themselves are weak. Foxes never win a physical fight with a human.
In Japanese, a fox's bark is written, "Kitsu! Kitsu!"
This myth comes from a folk etymology of the word "kitsune," in
which "kitsu" is onomatopoeia for a fox's bark and "ne" means "sound."
Therefore, a fox is something which makes the noise "kitsu." Whether
this derivation of the word is true or not, it's been a long, long
time since Japanese foxes said "kitsu." Modern Japanese write the
fox bark as "kon kon."