Lafcadio Hearn, in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, said "After having travelled much in Japan, you will find that whenever you try to recall any country-place you have visited, there will appear in some nook or corner of that remembrance a pair of green and grey foxes of stone". Even today, when people find themselves bewildered by the bright neon and crowded cities, this image remains throughout the country.

Though the shrines are perhaps not as popular as they once were, Hearn’s comment still rings true. . The image of the fox is inescapable in Japan even now. Whether it be thousands of fox statues spread over an entire hillside in Kyoto, an immaculately-kept little shrine tucked away in a corner of Akihabara, or even a tiny, unadorned wooden thing with only a paper flag carrying a fox image, it can be found in every town or village in Japan, and it is invariably associated with Inari. The fox as a malicious being is known, but expressions of this rarely appear, except in collections of old tales. This widespread distribution may be one reason why the fox is still so well-known.

In modern Japan, Inari, in its role as the god of wealth, remains one of the most popular gods, and the fox, by association, represents good fortune, or during less successful periods, the continuing hope of good fortune. The fox, in its role as Komainu (??) or stone lion, flanking the shrine and offering its protection, is always there whenever someone makes a prayer to the god.
But while the Japanese fox is almost entirely associated with Inari, the Chinese fox has not managed to attain such an elevated status. As in Japan, foxes appear in many old tales, and in fact are the most numerous creatures in Pu Songling's Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio, an early Qing dynasty collection of ghost stories and folktales from throughout the country. References to foxes as supernatural beings still crops up from time to time in the media; for example, the South China Morning Post reported in 1996 of a woman in eastern China who had beaten her son to death believing him to be possessed by a fox. However, references to foxes in China become somewhat rarer after the Qing dynasty.

In fact, there was much more to fox beliefs in both countries than simply supernatural folktales and associations with Shinto deities. Throughout Japan and Northern China, many folk practices and beliefs such as fox possession and fox sorcery were carried out, even before the founding of the Inari religion. In these early practices, the foxes of both cultures followed similar developments, yet it was only in Japan that the fox achieved its elevation to the Shinto pantheon.

In this text, I will explore why this transformation of the foxes image was able to occur in Japan, and why a similar phenomenon did not happen in China despite the similar origins of the two countrys' legends.

In answering this question, I intend to look at three principal areas that might shed some light on it. Firstly, I will look at the origins of the fox practices of the two countries and show how, despite popular belief, folk practices and beliefs involving the fox existed long before the existence of Japan or China.

Next I will examine the folk practices that existed in both countries, that existed, in Japan’s case, before the connection with mainstream religion was established, and in both cases, alongside mainstream religion though not itself a part of it.
Thirdly I will look at the wealth of folktales revolving around the supernatural fox in both countries, and how these tales, while fictional accounts, reflected the general attitude towards fox beliefs at the time.

Lastly, I will examine why the fox did become so entangled with the Inari religion in Japan, and compare this to the fox's development in China, where it did not achieve any kind of religious status beyond the folk practices discussed in chapter two.

A note about romanisation: I have used the pinyin system in rendering romanised versions of the Chinese terms used in this dissertation. The only exception is when I am quoting directly and the pinyin spelling cannot be easily determined.