The Japanese raccoon dog, and the shape-changer the old records make of it. Before the twentieth century it is not the genial figure that now stands outside shops: it eats the head priest of a temple and keeps his post, it paints with its tail, and it turns into household objects, above all a tea kettle. The name has never been stable — the graph now read tanuki has at times stood for a wildcat, a badger and a flying squirrel — and the cheerful pottery statue known worldwide was shaped in the 1930s.