Yokai Quiz
Bake-danuki (Shape-shifting Raccoon Dog)
Living near the village and the temple, you change your looks and your voice — and win people over with a drum roll on your own belly.
In Japanese folktales and legends, the bake-danuki is a tanuki — a raccoon dog — that loves to fool people. It's best known from pictures of one setting a leaf on its head and doing a flip in midair to turn into something else, and tales from many regions tell of it drumming on its round belly like a drum on moonlit nights.
In the folktale “Bunbuku Chagama,” passed down at Morinji temple in Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture, a tanuki turns itself into a tea kettle and becomes a hit performing tightrope tricks. It finds the shape that will delight people, transforms, and puts on a show for whoever's watching. You're at the center of the circle, changing your expression and the way you talk to suit the moment, keeping everyone entertained.
Bake-danuki stories are usually tied to a particular temple or village, and the tanuki comes all the way down from the mountains to play its tricks on people. Your act is sharpest close to the bustle of everyday life. On the flip side, if you spend too long somewhere quiet with no one around, you're left with nobody to perform for and not much to do.
Strengths
- You can read the mood of a gathering and switch to the way of talking that suits it best
- Where people get together, you can loosen things up with a little trick or a funny story
- You look forward to local events and street festivals and help liven them up
Where you may stumble
- After several days somewhere with no one around, you lose your spark
- You end up having to use two different ways of talking in front of two people at once, and scramble
- In your eagerness to get laughs, a joke goes further than you can take back
Sounds familiar, Bake-danuki (Shape-shifting Raccoon Dog)?
- You keep one prop on hand for parties — something like a pair of novelty glasses with a fake nose
- On the day of the local festival, you look suspiciously at home in a festival coat
- Each shop on your usual shopping street calls you by a slightly different name
Where you shine
When there's entertainment at a neighborhood event or a crowded get-together, that's the stage where the Bake-danuki's act tends to go over best.
Tips for “Bake-danuki (Shape-shifting Raccoon Dog)”
- Somewhere new, listen closely to how one person talks before you try a transformation
- After a joke, glance at the other person's face once to check that they're laughing
- Now and then, step out of the act and be the one laughing at someone else's
Matches
See every match in the Yokai Quiz compatibility chart →
Zashiki-warashi (House Spirit) — A house with a Zashiki-warashi is said to prosper. If the Tanuki livens up the village out front while the Zashiki-warashi quietly settles into the back of the house, the good times don't end after one night — they carry on for a long while.
Kasa-obake (Umbrella Spirit) — The Kasa-obake also loves to hop out in front of people and give them a fright. The Tanuki surprises by transforming, the umbrella by showing up just as it is — so even though you both like to surprise people, your acts don't overlap, and you can enjoy watching each other's turn.
Tengu (Mountain Goblin) — The Tengu stays out of sight deep in the mountains and lives by its own unchanging ways. To the Tengu, the Tanuki's habit of transforming in front of a crowd can look flippant, and to the Tanuki, the Tengu's silence makes it hard to know where the laugh is.
Close neighbors
These differ from this one on just 1 of the 3 axes. If one of your axes was near the middle, you may have their side too.
Which one are you? 18 everyday situations, about 3 minutes.
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