Danzaburo-danuki (Niigata)

Danzaburo-danuki (also Danzaburo-mujina) is a tanuki (mujina, in the Sado vocabulary) chief said to inhabit Sado Island, Niigata. He is counted among the three great named tanuki of Japan, alongside Shibaemon-danuki of Awaji and Hage-danuki of Yashima, and stands as the figural symbol of the Sado tradition in which the tanuki, not the fox, takes the principal role of transformation. The canonical narrative places Danzaburo at Aikawa or Ryotsu in Sado, taking human form to assist travellers or to lend money as a benevolent tanuki, while leading the Sado tanuki war against rival tanuki. A folk tradition holds that no fox lives on Sado, the absence variously attributed to Danzaburo's having driven them out; Danzaburo is treated as a guardian-figure of the island. The figure is recorded in Edo-period and modern Sado gazetteers and in regional works such as Sato Enjiro's Sado Kidan, and in the lineage of Yanagita Kunio's post-Tono Monogatari tanuki studies; Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005) systematizes the figure. The Nichibunken Strange Phenomena and Yokai Folklore Database also gives an independent entry. Within Sado the tanuki traditions reach beyond Danzaburo to include Futatsuiwa Danzaburo and the mujina of Seki-no-Samuto, in a layered network of named tanuki. With Shibaemon-danuki of Awaji and Hage-danuki of Yashima he forms the canonical "three great named tanuki," compared also with the Sanchu-danuki lineage of Kagawa.