Project MUSE - (Re)animating Folklore: Raccoon Dogs, Foxes, and Other Supernatural Japanese Citizens in Takahata Isao’s Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko
Raccoon Dogs, Foxes, and Other Supernatural Japanese Citizens in Takahata Isao’s Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko
Melek Ortabasi (bio)
Abstract
Takahata Isao’s animated film Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko (Tanuki Battle of the Heisei Era, 1994) is a unique demonstration of the affinity between the supernatural aspects of folklore and animation itself. Featuring anthropomorphized animals that possess the uncanny powers attributed to them by folklore, Pompoko mobilizes the medium to display the animals’ shape-shifting skills in their war against the humans who threaten their habitat. Pompoko’s visual extrapolation of folk belief allows these animals to become more than a nostalgic reification of stable Japanese identity. By forcing drastic encounters between the realistic and the fantastic, Takahata’s film questions whether the human anxieties embodied in fox and raccoon dog folklore are really a thing of the past. I argue that Pompoko, through the medium of anime, shows how folklore can become an effective ideological tool for questioning what it actually means to be a (post)modern Japanese.
One day long ago, a lord on the island of Shikoku found two identical-looking women sitting in his house, each claiming to be his wife. A doctor speculated that some ailment had caused the wife’s spirit to separate into two. Even so, chanting Buddhist prayers did not resolve the problem. Deciding to imprison the women for the time being, the lord noticed that one of them did not like ordinary food. Subjecting this woman to torture, he found that she was, in fact, a fox, or kitsune. As he was about to kill the animal, however, a huge crowd of people—thousands of them, including Buddhist priests—gathered at his gate. “We are the foxes of the whole of Shikoku, who come to you with a request,” they said. “The fox who has done you a wrong is … Osagitsune … a messenger of [the rice god] Inari, and the King of the Foxes in Japan. If you do him harm, there will come great calamity upon the country. He is our teacher of haunting, and if he dies, we cannot haunt any longer. Please spare his life!” The lord agreed, but with one condition: that all the foxes leave Shikoku forever. Leaving behind a signed written oath, the animals all departed by boat, and since that time there have been no foxes in Shikoku. 1
This tale from an eighteenth-century text encapsulates several key aspects of the extensive Japanese folklore surrounding the fox and other kindred animals, such as the tanuki, or raccoon dog. 2 Most striking is these animals’ ability to impersonate human beings, considered a haunting. Such animals use this ability to trick humans or to add weight to an important request, as in this tale, or for a variety of other reasons, such as to become a Buddhist monk or to make a visit to the doctor! 3 Clearly, the human characters seem to fear this haunting, responding [End Page 254] with a swift move to root out and destroy such imposters; tales of samurai and hunters outwitting foxes and raccoon dogs often end in the animal’s punishment by death. 4 On the other hand, despite the foxes’ desire to live in close proximity to humans (and at times become them), they stand up to humans when one of their own is threatened, thus asserting an uncanny sort of cultural autonomy. Defining themselves in terms of their magical abilities, animals in such tales often remind the humans of the spiritual power they have over them, even as the humans assert their own dominance in the physical realm. In the end, however, as this story and many others seem to imply, the supernatural is revealed as animal trickery, and clear distinctions between the species are preserved.
Although tales like that of the Shikoku lord seem to perform a sort of purification ritual in which humans successfully eliminate species confusion, the fact that the animals have a culture of their own speaks to fundamental conflicts within human identity. Animals in oral and written literature have long served as objectified others on which to project the fears and desires of the human self, much as racial others have functioned in imperialist narratives. 5 In contrast to the interracial power play that characterizes imperial and postcolonial literature, however, the relationships between humans and animals in folktales cannot address a combined audience of colonizer and colonized. Because they cannot write or talk back, animals enact the role of the other in a more extreme fashion than the colonized. In effect, the distinct culture that the animals represent is really a space within which humans can inscribe their own questions about identity. This externalized exploration of interiority is particularly prominent in fox and raccoon dog tales, because so much of their appeal resides in the exposure of these transgressive others who can—and do—challenge the boundaries of the human self.
Takahata Isao’s 1994 animated film Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko (Tanuki Battle of the Heisei Era, hereafter Pompoko) accesses, updates, and greatly extrapolates the fox and raccoon dog folktale tradition and the inhering crisis within modern Japanese society as it relates to both the environment and a homogeneous notion of Japanese identity. Pompoko is the story of a band of tanuki who, in the late 1960s, unsuccessfully seek to stop the construction of a suburban housing development in their home, the very real Tama Hills (southwest of Tokyo). Driven to desperation by the growing lack of food and territory, the usually fun-loving tanuki decide they need an organized plan of attack. The leaders of the group invite “great masters” from other parts of the country to harness and refine the transformation skills of the entire tanuki community. Using their magical abilities to trick, bluff, cajole, terrify, and otherwise dissuade the humans from building the project, resulting in some human casualties, the animals continue to bicker among themselves about whether their war is aggressive or persuasive. Yet construction continues, even when the tanuki launch their greatest magical [End Page 255] effort, Operation Yōkai, a massive ghost parade. This peaceful but impressive display of the supernatural reveals itself to be simply a fun spectacle for the human spectators, and the tanuki must ultimately admit defeat. After consulting with a group of foxes who have successfully abandoned the forest and integrated themselves into human life, many of the tanuki conclude that they too must use their transformational skills to become human and live their lives out that way. Those who cannot must remain animals who continue to battle against human encroachment on their habitat.
Produced by the esteemed Studio Ghibli, Pompoko was both popular and critically acclaimed in Japan; it beat out all domestic films and Disney’s Lion King for top box office honors ( Schilling, Encyclopedia, 144 ) and became Japan’s nomination for that year’s Oscar for best foreign film ( Patten 281 ). Reviewers have pointed out that the film did not translate well in the overseas market, however, possibly because of the story’s preoccupation with a local rather than a cross-cultural folkloric tradition. 6 Non-Japanese critics have even chastised Pompoko for its domestic popular appeal, pointing to the film’s “eco-moralizing” ( Schilling, Contemporary Film, 202 ) and to the “nostalgic element” created by the film’s romantic view of Japan’s rural and agricultural past ( Cavallaro, Animé Art, 109 ). Takahata’s homage to traditional tales in a context of contemporary concerns, however, paints anything but a simple picture of postmodern Japanese identity.
A “functionalist” argument that ascribes Pompoko’s domestic success to its “appeal to traditional narrative patternings” would assume that the film simply “played itself out for a cultural audience that needed to see its own self-perceptions reified” ( Koven 181–82 ). In some senses this is true: Pompoko is one of many films since the 1960s that have used yōkai (monsters or supernatural beings) to represent familiar “native heroes” who can reassuringly rectify the wrongs of actual history, rather than “outsiders,” who pose a threat to the nation ( Papp 233–34 ). As Zília Papp has argued, however, yōkai have an ambiguous status “on the borderline between the familiar (uchi) and the outside world (soto) in Japanese visual narratives” (236), making them profoundly fluid as visual symbols. Although their “core feature” is their adaptability to each new ideological context (238), a film like Pompoko shows that the malleability of such yōkai as foxes and raccoon dogs allows them to be subversive and uncanny as well.
Although animal yōkai have frequently been used in the service of nationalistic, self-reassuring narratives, their sheer mutability also indicates a potential to “explode the myths of cultural stability and order” on which Japan and other nations “have conventionally depended for the purposes of self-legitimation and self-perpetuation” ( Cavallaro, Fairy Tale, 50 ). This is indeed the case of Pompoko. The tanuki and kitsune in the film do not just represent an updating of their historical “folk” selves; their bodies actually evolve to become sites of [End Page 256] phantasmagoric spectacle and constant, unpredictable change, allowing Takahata to critically explore issues relevant to contemporary Japanese society. In their bid to drive the humans out of their shrinking habitat, the tanuki work with their elders to develop their haunting skills to the level where they can assume, literally, any shape to suit any context. Thus even though the animals in Pompoko no longer have the cultural authority to negotiate directly with humans, as they did in the folkloric tradition, the film is obsessed with their ability to transform, attributing to the animals far greater powers—and more interaction with human society—than this tradition ever did. Rather than remaining a simple reconfirmation of nostalgic national flavor, the symbolic and physical instability of the animal characters in Pompoko also registers as a subversive form of anxiety and potential resistance.
In contrast to tanuki and kitsune lore, the film uses the animals’ mutability to break down the species distinction that folktales usually seek to maintain. Unlike the story of the kitsune and the Shikoku lord, the defeated animals in Pompoko are not exactly driven out. Although those who are unable or unwilling to coexist with humans leave on a boat, just as in the older tale, 7 or else live a precarious life in close proximity with humans, those able and willing to adapt or transform become incorporated into human society by living out their lives as humans. This sublimation of the other within the self is elegiac only if we interpret the animals in Pompoko as static folkloric symbols embodying traditional ways of Japanese life that have literally been buried in the effort to modernize and industrialize. I would argue instead that the film’s dynamically transforming animals are more interesting as a distorted example of what animation scholar Thomas LaMarre has called “speciesism,” or the “displacement of race and racism (relations between humans as imagined in racial terms) onto relations between humans and animals” (“Speciesism I,” 76). LaMarre suggests that speciesism in the postwar animated films he examines “strives to overcome racist segregations by evoking multispecies cooperation” (“Speciesism II,” 72). Pompoko’s unstable multispecies landscape is less reassuring; instead of working out the problems of a contemporary, multiracial Japan, it struggles instead to express the collapse of a supposedly homogeneous Japanese cultural identity at war with its own idealized past.
This destabilization of the distinction between animals and humans is made possible by Pompoko’s exploitation of the animation medium, which makes visible what folk narrative and earlier visual art featuring foxes and raccoon dogs could only suggest. Folktales in particular have tended to focus primarily on the confusion, surprise, fear, or anger experienced by human victims of tanuki and kitsune magic rather than on the magic itself. The tale of the Shikoku lord is like many others in that it is silent about the actual moment in which the woman transforms back into a fox under the duress of torture. 8 Although the lord witnesses the (undoubtedly) grotesque scene, the narrative chooses to gloss over [End Page 257] it, favoring instead a conclusion that highlights his clemency and authority. In many tales the animals’ magic working is further obscured by being consigned to the realm of hearsay; although the animal’s death precipitates its return to animal form, the transformational moment is not witnessed by any characters in the story. 9 Sometimes, the animal’s physical transformation is not even necessary to the story, as in cases where both foxes and raccoon dogs appear in human form in people’s dreams. 10 Finally, the mystery of transformation could simply take the form of a human being who suddenly claims or seems to be possessed by a kitsune or tanuki without actually changing shape. 11
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Fig 1.
“Tanuki no kanban,” one of a series of comic woodblock prints ca. 1842, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Tanuki, known for their supposed ability to greatly enlarge their scrotums, are here using them as shop signs.
Owing to the intrinsic advantages of visual media, images from the Edo period (c. 1603–1868) onward gravitated toward focusing on the transformation of the animals in fox and raccoon dog narratives, a transformation that previously tended not to be represented textually. 12 The humorous grotesqueries that resulted highlight from a new angle the lore’s ongoing preoccupation with the porous boundaries of human identity. Woodblock artists such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861) created comical vignettes featuring humanoid tanuki performing everyday tasks, suggesting that the animals secretly lived double lives ( fig. 1 ). Kuniyoshi’s well-worn style of personifying animals, while suggestive of the animals’ supernatural abilities, has more disturbing visual counterparts that speculate overtly on the animals’ apparent desire to insinuate themselves into human life. Capturing the ambiguous moment of transformation itself, Toriyama Sekien’s (1712–1788) image of a mujina (or tanuki) 13 sitting at the hearth in half-human, half-animal form is oddly voyeuristic and vaguely unsettling; the viewer has caught the animal off guard, but how long has he been fooling others in the house ( fig. 2 )? Other images reveal unexpected secrets by adopting precisely the sort of trickery attributed to tanuki and kitsune themselves. The well-known kage’e (shadow picture) depicted in Figure 3 , by Kuniyoshi, reveals the sinister and otherworldly truth that apparently lurks behind a common, easily identifiable object. These visual gags may be droll in attitude, but [End Page 258] they all rely on the disorientation and surprise that result from an implicit challenge to the authority and stability of the human gaze.
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Fig 2.
“Mujina” by Toriyama Sekien, from the Konjaku Gazuzoku Hyakki (The Illustrated One Hundred Demons from the Present and the Past, 1781).
For Pompoko Takahata draws on the humorous, sly, and somewhat grotesque flavor of these earlier visual representations, invoking and building on the strategies they introduced. Extrapolating the proposition implicit in the static scenes offered by his predecessors, Takahata makes the animals’ mutability central to the film’s plot, exposing every detail of their [End Page 259] transformational skills as they use them in their everyday lives and in their fight to stop human encroachment on their territory. This evolved aestheticization and narrative expansion on what had previously been limited to a fleeting (or hidden) moment has two seemingly contradictory effects. Although the tanuki’s fully animated, repeat performances of transformation in the film normalize the strange and unexplained for viewers, inuring them to surprise and shock, they simultaneously demonstrate the uncanny affinity between the animals’ old-fashioned talents and a technocultural tool: animation itself. Even if the animals cannot win their real-world fight against deforestation, by transplanting them to this new visual habitat, Pompoko lets these folk creatures acquire the fully transgressive symbolic potential that older media could not provide.
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Fig 3.
A kage’e (shadow print) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, ca. 1848. These paired images show what appear to be the silhouettes of three goldfish (L), while the other reveals the “true” scene of a tanuki crushing a hunter with his scrotum (R).
Like their forebears in folk narrative, Pompoko’s animal protagonists take care not to appear as themselves in front of diegetic humans—but they are always on view to the audience. This narrative perspective puts considerable demand on the film to fill in the lacunae left by folk narrative, which it does by setting visually evolved tanuki and kitsune loose in an animated landscape to which they are clearly native. By this I mean that Pompoko’s animals adhere primarily to the laws of animation rather than to those of nature (or even folklore). This makes them fundamentally different from the tanuki characters in the wildly popular live-action tanuki goten (raccoon palace) musicals of the 1950s, played by human actors who display few animal characteristics ( figs. 4 – 6 ). 14 [End Page 260]
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Figs 4 & 5.
The tanuki characters Okuro (Wakao Ayako) and her father Doroemon (Sugai Ichirō) in Hatsuharu tanuki goten (Spring at the tanuki palace, 1959). While Doroemon has his tanuki makeup on when we first see him (top), he spends the majority of the film as a human (bottom). Wakao, the beautiful young star, never wears tanuki-like makeup — despite the fact that she lives in a tree hollow.
In these live-action films it is assumed that viewers accept the tanuki conceit, which is used primarily to provide an excuse for slapstick humor and elaborate song-and-dance routines showcasing contemporary stars more or less being themselves. By contrast, Pompoko features characters who can literally become anyone, giving credence to LaMarre’s assertion that “animation loves animals” by ably satisfying viewers’ “kinetophilia,” or the “sheer delight in movement, as well as a fascination with plasticity and elasticity” (“Speciesism I,” 79). Indeed, the hidden tanuki and kitsune culture takes shape in Takahata’s film primarily as an extreme ability to adapt continually and violently according to narrative context and perspective.
Because of their animation-enhanced talents, the tanuki in Pompoko, unlike their cousins in the 1950s musicals, lack a stable visual identity. Even though the tanuki do not all possess good shape-shifting skills—a fact that provides [End Page 261] the opportunity for slapstick humor of a different variety 15 —every animal habitually appears in at least “three primary modes of depiction: realistic, comic and iconic” ( Brophy 185 ). The film begins with the realistic depiction of undifferentiated tanuki foraging for food; their appearance and behavior is least abstracted from the actual animal ( fig. 7 ). The comic depiction emerges periodically, particularly when the tanuki indulge their well-known asobigokoro (playful spirit). In this mode too they lack individuality and, as one might guess, display their most stereotypically folk characteristics ( fig. 8 ). These two-dimensional modes are supplemented by an iconic mode, where the tanuki possess agency, complex emotions, and independent will, much as would human characters. It is in this anthropomorphic, individuated state, which is rarely revealed to the humans in the film, that the animal characters of Pompoko apparently prefer to spend most of their time ( fig. 9 ).
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Fig 6.
This still from Ōatari tanuki goten (Tanuki palace extravaganza, 1958) features tanuki princess Kinuta hime (Yukimura Izumi) with her tanuki ladies-in-waiting as they appear throughout the film. These tanuki never take on animal forms; their status as folklore animals is indicated only at a very basic level by their roles in the well-worn plot also featured in Hatsuharu tanuki goten. The main attractions of this film, which features even less trick photography than Hatsuharu, are singing idols Yukimura and the even more famous Misora Hibari, who appears in drag as the tanuki prince, Tanukichirô.
Although several visual identities for a single character are common in manga and anime, in Pompoko this strategy for expressing the emotional state of a character also foregrounds the multifaceted and contradictory roles the animals play in the cultural imagination. 16 A sustained dissonance governs the tanuki’s supposedly self-generated mode switching precisely because each mode indicates a different way in which humans conceive of the animals. At the beginning of the film the viewer watches some realistic tanuki engaging in natural behavior, seemingly unaware that they are being watched. The voiceover, however, features tanuki commenting nostalgically (in human voices) on their own behavior in the [End Page 262]
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Fig 9.
Tanuki in their “iconic” mode, clearly individualized and engaged in a strategy meeting. They are differentiated from one another not only by distinctive facial features and consistent habits of dress, but by personality and social status as well.
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scene, effectively informing the audience that the mode depicted represents only one aspect of their identities. The odd disjunction between the image of nonverbal animals and the reflective, storytelling tone of the voiceover also implies that the tanuki are somehow both subject and object.
In subsequent scenes there are at least two other reasons for realistic tanuki to appear, each of which continues to distance the audience from a conventionalized, instrumentalist perspective of the world. When human characters are in the scene, for example, the realistic mode is the only way in which they seem able to perceive the animals; their blindness seems to comment on the restricted understanding of interspecies relationships offered by contemporary scientific knowledge. The privileged viewpoint of the audience in relation to the diegetic humans can also increase the pathos of a situation when the tanuki characters suddenly revert to realistic mode in the presence of humans or their technology, unable to fully carry out or sustain their carefully laid plans ( fig. 10 ). The relatively smaller bodies and nonverbal behavior they reacquire in these moments of physical and psychic crisis certainly highlight the limits of their magic and their helplessness in the face of human power. In this way, the realistic mode suggests to the audience the pitfalls of equating scientific and technological omnipotence with knowledge of the world.
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Fig 10.
Granny Oroku, the formidable transformation instructor who always wears a red kimono and a fancy traditional wig even in her “iconic” form, thinks quickly in order to disguise the “real” identity of one of her students. After he collapses from the exhaustion of manifesting in human form, she picks him up quickly and wears him as a fur stole.
The realistic mode, however, best functions as a tool of defamiliarization in tandem with the other two modes, which take the more personified and culturalized forms suggested by fox and raccoon dog folklore. The [End Page 264] comic mode, a cartoonish, unindividuated style assumed by the tanuki when they have neither the ability nor the will to remain serious, refers to the tanuki’s supposed penchant for merrymaking. Because they party and brawl as humans do, these animals are somewhat humanized, allowing them to act as reminders of human foibles; even in the face of imminent danger, the tanuki foolishly opt for this unreflective, selfish mode and throw an epic party in celebration of a small victory, or else fight pointlessly among themselves over scarce resources. The characterization of this folklore-ordained emotional attribute as a distinct mode, however, also codes them as subhuman, childish beings. Their lack of self-reflexiveness in this state is indicated not only by a caricatured, overtly two-dimensional style but also by the fact that they take to it in great numbers at mob mentality moments. The uninflected and predictable behavior they exhibit in this mode is further expressed in the actual reuse, in different scenes, of the same repetitive party sequence. In the short sequences where the tanuki take on this form, the chaos they create is both stereotypical and harmless; drinking sake, playing Japanese instruments, and dancing with fans, they mimic the human realm rather than interact with it. It is telling that the last time we see the comic tanuki is on the boat taking away those who cannot or will not join human society ( fig. 11 ). The flat, nostalgic conception of folklore these comic figures represent, the scene suggests, is nothing but an obsolete motif. Because these comic tanuki represent only a limited and literal view of tradition, it is the last mode that truly adds complexity to the folkloric perspective.
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Fig 11.
Absorbed in rejecting reality and in “comic” mode, the fugitive tanuki spirits ride off on a takarabune (treasure boat), a popular religious icon associated both with prosperity and the dispelling of bad dreams.
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In their nuanced iconic form the tanuki invoke their folkloric origins in complex ways, clearly functioning as surrogate human selves designed to question human arrogance. Although the personification of animals often provides humans with an interspecies metaphor for delivering self-critique, Pompoko takes special advantage by exploiting the tanuki’s well-established fondness for mimicking human life. The film’s iconic tanuki may still exhibit stereotypical folk behavior, such as thumping their belly drums in a gesture of satisfaction, 17 but they possess psychologically complex and strongly individuated identities, living comfortably in a community governed by fundamentally human social laws. Going far beyond the limited conceit suggested by Kuniyoshi’s woodblock print series, these tanuki do not merely ape human habits for humorous effect but actively seek to retain the human privilege of raising their families in a supportive and safe society.
The competing desires of humans and iconic tanuki recall the logic of speciesism: Pompoko’s humans enact the familiar metaphor of one race depriving another less powerful race of the human rights they all deserve. This clichéd, dualistic model is effective enough in delivering a transnationally accessible environmental message, but it fails to explain another type of logic that governs the tanuki-human allegory. Like the best literary doppelganger, the tanuki in this mode are not only ventriloquists for human guilt but also uncanny externalizations of humanity that “[challenge] the location of the [human] self in a coherent and singular body” ( Cuthbert 226 ). Unlike the doubles of modern literature, however, the tanuki of Pompoko are not shadow selves for particular human individuals; they are projections of a more general psychological crisis brought on by modern media culture. In folklore tanuki and kitsune have long provided psychological services for humans; they were the explanation for strange, unfathomable human behavior outside social norms. Pompoko, which is self-consciously more ambitious and deals with a different zeitgeist, instead uses the iconic tanuki and their ability to embody human anxiety to show that an attachment to technology has blinded humans to anything that the modern media cannot explain.
This human inability to see is a mass psychological phenomenon, apparent in the fact that the entire neighborhood is amazed and entertained by the spectacular and otherworldly ghost parade that is the centerpiece of the tanuki’s war on the humans; the residents are satisfied with the unlikely explanation that the parade was simply a promotional event for a new amusement park ( fig. 12 ). 18 Despite the effort expended, which results in the death of Inugami (one of the elders), the tanuki’s grand performance fails to draw a deep psychological response from its audience. The virtuosic [End Page 266] display ends all too soon, leaving nothing behind and reminding the viewer of the prosaic “role that animated film plays in our everyday lives” as a technologically agile but shallow distraction we simply shake off when we resume our normal activities ( Yonemura 56 ). Even though the monsters cavorting among the apartment blocks of Tama Hills is the most memorable sequence in the film, Pompoko nevertheless seems uncomfortable with a role where it celebrates tanuki lore by simply providing a pleasurable spectacle for passive human consumption.
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Fig 12.
A selected scene from “Operation Yōkai,” the prolonged ghostly spectacle performed by the tanuki in the Tama Hills housing development. Visual references are from both premodern and contemporary sources, reflecting the media savvy of the tanuki themselves.
Instead, in a truly ironic and self-reflexive moment, the film has the tanuki realize the role that the modern mass media has played in managing and controlling human vision. Making a last attempt to return from repression, the animals send a letter through the postal service asking for a television interview to tell their side of the story. Perhaps humans will see them if they appear on a recognized media outlet. A television crew takes the bait, arriving in the forest with cameras and microphones in the manner of a campy reality show about ghost hunting. Hiding out of view in their iconic form, tanuki speak in human voices from behind the bushes, but this fails to satisfy the truth-seeking reporter. Singing a children’s folk song, he attempts to lure the tanuki out of hiding, saying that they must perform their transformation skills on camera or “this show is going to look like a bad joke.” Driven to desperate measures, two of the most senior tanuki summon their courage and appear before the humans in their iconic form ( fig. 13 ). “We’re the ones who put on the ghost parade…. This is where we live, and you don’t have the right to destroy it!” This scene is [End Page 267] the only one in which humans and tanuki in their most anthropomorphized mode have a real conversation.
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Fig 13.
An indignant and righteous Granny Oroku, with Abbot Tsurugame on her shoulders, confronts the reporters and TV cameras.
The humans’ intense affective response during this brief exchange suggests that the tanuki’s mutability provides an important commentary on contemporary human subjectivity. Although the reporter tells the hidden tanuki that he “shares their point of view,” the fact is that he cannot. He expresses surprise and excitement when the animals show themselves in realistic form, but his demeanor changes dramatically when the iconic tanuki suddenly appear. In the moment after Granny Oroku speaks to the trembling reporter, she demonstrates her abilities by transforming from her iconic form into a huge, fierce bear. This performance causes the reporter and his cameraman, who are clearly just as terrified as the tanuki, to spontaneously lose consciousness, apparently mentally unable to process precisely the truth they were seeking. The typical defense mechanism the reporter and his cameraman display suggests an obvious diagnosis: confronted with a classic doppelganger “appear[ing] out of place in order to displace [the] host,” the humans are unable to assimilate or accept the palpable threat that the iconic animals and their transformational skills represent to their powerful self-image ( Webber 4 ). 19 The humans soon recover from their insensible state, but significantly, the tanuki have already assumed more “proper” forms as nonthreatening, realistic forest animals ( fig. 14 ). We already know that nothing will remain on videotape, because modern technology, unlike folklore, cannot detect when the human subject has become “split into two.” Or can it? [End Page 268]
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Fig 14.
The reporter and his cameraman wake up to find themselves surrounded by a variety of transformed tanuki, who have taken the shape of realistic woodland animals.
Not content with providing spectacle alone, Pompoko uses animation itself to rework the psychological phenomenon manifested in premodern fox and raccoon dog lore for Japan’s postmodernity. The tanuki act as doubles of today’s Japanese through their radical ability to transform themselves and their surroundings, an attribute that enabled the nation’s rapid reinvention of itself in the modern age. Destabilizing the traditional image of the tanuki even further, Pompoko’s animals finally exist perpetually between forms, because the final measure the animals take to survive means living double (or triple) lives as humans and tanuki in their realistic and iconic forms. Unlike in Japanese folk tradition or in doppelganger literature, Pompoko’s animals do not function as catch-all explanations for the weird and unexplained or as unsuccessfully suppressed aspects of humanity. By both collapsing and reifying the boundary between human and animal, the film insinuates instead that the tanuki act as must today’s Japanese: adapt to a rapidly changing world, or be eliminated.
The mimicry of the tanuki in Pompoko, as in folklore, therefore points back at humans—but in this case to argue that contemporary Japanese are largely unaware of the unnatural, ongoing self-transformation they have brought upon themselves in the process of embracing modernity. On many occasions the tanuki express horror at human encroachment on nature, made possible by the acquisition of powers greater and much more dangerous than the tanuki’s. In a deeply ironic commentary on the humans in the film, who do not reflect on their own technological prowess, one of the animals surveys in horror the entire city that has gone up during his three-year absence: “Humans did this?! [End Page 269] No, it’s only tanuki who can do this kind of thing!” The misguided humans in the film instead direct their fear elsewhere, at the supposed incommensurability of tanuki transformation with natural laws. For example, the reporter and his cameraman are clearly fascinated but terrified by the idea that an intelligent, verbal being can shed its identity and transform itself beyond recognition in little more than an instant. But they do not recognize themselves as modern Japanese in that metaphor, at least not consciously.
Scholars of the posthuman have thoroughly discussed the link between science fiction and the psychological pressure exercised by modernity; the genre’s closeted relation with the past has been less discussed. Yet science fiction is a futuristic cousin to folklore, where human fears and desires take the shape of cyborgs, sentient robots, and other forms of hybrid life. Replacing the yōkai doubles of folklore with such technologized creatures, science fiction works through the dilemmas of a new age by “often draw[ing] on ‘premodern’ models, in which human beings are defined not simply by their status as active, controlling subjects, but by their connection to and participation in a world of ‘other’ forces and agencies” ( Rutsky 19 ). Japanese science fiction anime, in particular, is well-known for visually exploring in literal fashion the idea that this “‘cyborg subject position’ is not stable, but mutational” ( Rutsky 19 ), graphically depicting human-machine-alien interfaces that lead to physically transformed, hybrid life forms. 20 Where science fiction fetishizes the blending of the human body with technology—the symbiotic relationship between the humans and their giant robot EVAs in Evangelion or even the ritualistic bodily transformation featured in Sailor Moon come to mind—Pompoko also uses this pervasive anime-ic trope to suggest that human consciousness is limited but potentially mutable. 21
Exploring the future of Japanese identity with more rustic materials, Pompoko thus reverse-engineers its folk animals, endowing them with the visual, dynamic characteristics native to animated science fiction so that they can seamlessly and credibly convert into humans whose location as subjects is clearly in question. Although Mark Schilling remarks only in passing that Pompoko has “more morphing than in ten Power Rangers episodes put together” ( Schilling, Encyclopedia, 144 ), a comparison between Takahata’s film and a conventional science fiction anime television series is more apt than it may seem. Shape shifting is often coded as pre- or even antitechnological magic, but Pompoko reinvents the tanuki’s innate compulsion to become human by embracing “animation’s lack of a more photographic relation to the physical and material forces of gravity, light, bodily weight and depth” ( Looser 317–18 ). Certainly Pompoko, like most Studio Ghibli films, presents a largely cinematic, organic world, 22 but when the tanuki morph into humans, the effect is not [End Page 270] un-Transformer-like ( fig. 15 ). Incrementally transforming into people who are clearly based on their iconic versions, the tanuki become indistinguishable from the other humans in the film; at the same time they remain avatarlike, wearing a metaphorical disguise.
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Fig 15.
Kinchō Daimyōjin VI, one of the tanuki elders, transforms back into his iconic form when he realizes that he is among other magical animals—the transformed foxes with whom he seeks to consult about joining the human race.
Preserving a measure of autonomy from humans through this visual transformative metaphor, the tanuki of Pompoko therefore become more than a symbol of fading human beliefs in the supernatural. Repressed and yet present as a fluctuating foreign presence in contemporary Japan, the tanuki in Takahata’s film introduce a unique sort of diversity and mutability into a society that still considers itself largely homogeneous. Although this is not the same as the science fiction anime that “valoriz[e] the constant emergence of variation as the truly definitive condition of human life and identity” ( Looser 314 ), Pompoko is nevertheless a nationalized proposal for “posthumanism,” or “the acknowledgement and activation of the trace of the inhuman within the human” ( Badmington 157 ). It seems that the repressed does always return and that its relationship with technology is not always adversarial. Collapsing the distinction between species that much folklore insists on, Pompoko presents an unusual sort of postmodern doppelganger who deploys its own agency in order to invisibly rejoin an unaware self.
And yet this reunion between animal and human is anything but invisible, because the film purposely takes the audience into its confidence. Unlike the diegetic humans, we know that the tanuki have literally become [End Page 271] a submerged and dispersed part of the (Japanese) self. Despite Pompoko’s comforting conclusion, where we leave the tanuki engaged in typical behavior—carefree partying on a golf course under a full moon—there is no real sense of closure. In a world where humans may or may not be tanuki, what does it really mean to “show one’s tail” (shippo o dasu), a common tanuki-inspired proverb that means to reveal one’s true character? Similarly, when a tanuki addresses the audience directly at the end of the film, asking them to “understand the tanuki’s point of view,” is he talking to the other or to the self? Even though it is cute to explain the phenomenon of average energy-drink-consuming salarymen as exhausted tanuki in need of a boost ( fig. 16 ), the composite identity implied by the numerous images of tanuki men and women near the end of the film does not signify a reconfirmation of a stable ethnic or cultural identity. Rather, it implies that things have to change on the inside—and that they already have. This is why Pompoko’s rewriting of premodern tanuki lore through sustained sourcing, transplantation, and transformation of familiar iconography is not simply an updating but ultimately a deconstruction of postmodern Japanese subjectivity. Using the animal other to explore the self, Pompoko’s distinctive use of animated speciesism results in a film that “assuage[s] … [the] racial anxieties” brought about by Westernization and modernization even as it lets the Japanese viewer “imagine other worlds of difference” ( LaMarre, “Speciesism I,” 92 ). Sometimes one’s own past is where the most compelling models for imagining difference can be found.
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Fig 16.
Two tired salarymen who stop to pick up an energy drink glance at each other—and have the unspoken mutual realization that they are both actually transformed tanuki.
[End Page 272]
Melek Ortabasi
Melek Ortabasi is an associate professor of world literature at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She specializes in modern Japanese literature and popular culture and has published several articles on anime. Her interest in folklore extends back to childhood, and as a literary scholar she has pursued the subject from several angles. She is co-editor of The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan (2006) and the author of The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio (2013).
Notes
1. Paraphrased and quoted from M. W. De Visser, who summarizes the late-seventeenth-century Honchō koji inenshū (Collection of Old Tales of Karmic Fate in Our Country), (67–68).
2. Michael Foster notes that “the kitsune and tanuki together have become indelibly linked with mysterious phenomena, and the combined reading of the Sinicized pronunciations of their graphs, kori, has come to signify all manner of weird occurrences” (36).
3. M. W. De Visser mentions a medieval kyōgen play titled Kitsune in which a fox takes the shape of a Buddhist monk to warn a hunter “that it is very bad to catch and kill foxes” (69). De Visser also paraphrases a tale from Kyokutei Bakin’s Enseki zasshi (Swallowstone Miscellany, 1810) in which a tanuki named Danzaburō seeks treatment from a human physician (85).
4. Although the perpetrator often feels the animal’s revenge in the form of illness, insanity, or even death, this is not always the case. For example, a hunter who shoots a tanuki that was posing as a bodhisattva suffers no misfortune. This story appears in similar form in the Konjaku monogatari shū (Tales of Times Now Past, twelfth century) and Uji shūi monogatari (A Collection of Tales from Uji, thirteenth century), both collections of setsuwa, short miscellaneous tales ( Fujimoto 13 ).
5. For example, R. Keller Kimbrough points out that animals played the roles of demonized or abjected others in late medieval Japanese Buddhist thought. Whether they acted as symbols of human shortcomings or represented weaker entities in need of protection, they occupied an inferior position. On the one hand, “animal-realm rebirth [was] the punishment for ‘the stupid and the shameless’” (182). On the other hand, descriptions or depictions of humans being tortured by animals in hell acted as “pronouncements against cruelty to farm animals” (189).
6. Studio Ghibli films are known for their refiguring of folklore, but Takahata’s more famous compatriot Miyazaki Hayao has been more successful internationally. Michael Foster speculates that it is “perhaps the eclectic nature of Miyazaki’s characters … that enables them to negotiate national borders with such success” (257).
7. The film makes the metaphor of the departure more explicit than in the older tale: the tanuki who leave on the boat are actually dead, having purposely sacrificed themselves to the cause; it is really only their spiritual selves who are departing for a better place.
8. The idea that that transformation is taxing for these animals is a well-established part of fox and raccoon dog folklore; death or physical stress always causes a transformed animal to reveal itself.
9. Foster translates a brief story from Shokoku hyaku monogatari (Hyaku Monogatari of the Various Provinces, 1677) in which a samurai kills a tanuki who poses as his dead wife. When he stabs her, the woman “disappear[s] into thin air”; the next day, a dead tanuki is found in “a hole in a grove located at the northwest corner of the property” (53–54).
10. De Visser relates a tale from Hotta Bakusui’s Sanshū kidan (Strange Tales from the Sanshū Region, 1764) in which a fox rewards a hunter for sparing her life [End Page 273] by appearing as a woman in his dream and sharing a secret that will make him rich (75).
11. In some regions of Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912), it was still believed that fox possession could be cured by forcing the animal to leave the human’s body. The departure was not apparent, however, apart from the fact that the patient would speak for the animal and simply fall unconscious once the fox invisibly departed through a window ( De Visser 75 ).
12. For a fairly detailed historical catalog of premodern and modern visual art featuring tanuki, see Schumacher .
13. Commenting on the power of folklore to affect knowledge, folk studies scholar Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) makes the point that regional nomenclature often differentiates between the tanuki and the mujina, even though biologists insist that they are one and the same animal (477).
14. The Japanese Movie Database ( http://www.jmdb.ne.jp/ ) lists no fewer than sixty-five movies that include the word tanuki in their titles, the earliest from 1914. Perusing this list chronologically reveals a concentration of tanuki musicals in the 1950s.
15. The senior tanuki start a sort of shape-shifting boot camp, where the viewer is treated to a number of funny images of training tanuki who, despite their best efforts, can only partially transform themselves.
16. Interestingly, Brophy argues that it is this potentially disorienting feature of the film, rather than its focus on native Japanese folklore, that “mak[es] it a film for the adventurous gaijin (foreigner)” only (185).
17. According to many folktales and songs, tanuki like to use their prominent bellies as drums. One of the sounds they make is “pompoko.”
18. The tanuki’s ghost parade is a live performance of a popular motif in premodern visual art: the hyakkiyagyō (procession of 100 demons). The tanuki, not realizing that modern humans have become largely immune to such spectacles, hope thereby to convince their audience that the new town is haunted.
19. The term doppelganger was originally defined in a literary context as “Leute, die sich selber sehen” (people who see themselves). “From the start, it seems that the subject may not so much have as be the Doppelgänger by seeing itself,” an insight that speaks to the divided subject this device has so often been used to signify ( Webber 3 ).
20. Classic examples include Kōkaku kidōtai (Ghost in the Shell, 1995), in which the character Kusanagi, already a cyborg, further merges with the Puppet Master, a disembodied, computerized life form. Akira (1988) presents a similar example; the character Tetsuo willingly allows himself to merge with or be taken over by Akira, another disembodied life-form created by humans themselves.
21. Thomas Looser, who coined the term anime-ic, uses it primarily to frame the relationship between visual media and contemporary “conditions of experience” rather than to describe a set of techniques specific to anime (300). Nevertheless, he identifies certain characteristics of anime, such as its “immateriality and flatness,” that, he argues, act as indicators of a postmodern shift in subjectivity and perspective (318).
22. Looser argues that Takahata’s colleague Miyazaki Hayao in fact uses “anime-ic techniques to critique and refute the structures of anime, in favor of the cinematic” (319). [End Page 274]
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