Kudagitsune Legend

The kudagitsune (tube fox) legend centres on Nagano (Shinshu), where ritual practitioners called kuda-tsukai were said to keep small fox spirits inside bamboo tubes and dispatch them to bring wealth from other houses or to possess rivals and cause illness. A person said to be possessed by a kudagitsune was reported to undergo a sudden change in speech and food preference, with the affliction released only through Shugendo or yamabushi rites. Households said to keep many kudagitsune were called kuda-mochi and were avoided in marriage and social exchange. The central distribution lies in the Ina, Suwa and Saku districts of Nagano and the Kofu basin of Yamanashi, overlapping with the Izuna belief area. The tradition is recorded in Yanagita Kunio's Santo Mintan-shu (1914), Hayami Yasutaka's Tsukimono-mochi Meishin (Kashiwa Shobo, 1976), Ishizuka Takatoshi's Nihon no Tsukimono (Miraisha, 1959), and the folklore volume of the Nagano prefectural history.