posh.wiki

Hi! I'm going to yap about the word "kitsune". My credentials are that I've been studying Japanese since 2020 and I'm a furry who's tired of everyone bastardising it.

狐.

This character is written using the kanji alphabet, borrowed from Chinese (so its pronunciation is not always obvious). It is composed of two parts: 犬 , which means "beast", and 瓜, which is a pronunciation hint for Chinese speakers (literally "melon").

In most cases, it is pronounced as kitsune. In a few cases where it appears in larger words, it might also be ko. Archaically it was also known to be kitsu, for the sound a fox makes, but now we say kon kon or gon gon for that.

It means "fox" - usually the red fox, vulpes vulpes, but generally it's used for other foxes too. If written with as キツネ (in the katakana alphabet used for foreign words) it might refer to a sly person, a dish involving udon noodles topped with fried tofu, or a golden-brown colour.

Japanese folklore does mention some fox spirits. Common themes include the ability to shape shift (bakeru) and bewitch (bakasu), as well as long life, a higher-than-normal number of tails, and association with the Shinto deity Inari. While these tales do refer to these creatures as "kitsune" (as well as more specific wording for the specified kind of spirit), there is nothing inherently supernatural about the word. It all comes from context.

It's almost if someone said that their original character is a "kettu", the Finnish word for fox. They could have just called it a fox, so why didn't they? They then explain that they're actually the fox who runs through the sky to create the northern lights, but that wasn't implied just by using the Finnish word.

I posit that to call something a "kitsune" to imply some kind of association with the other-worldly is insufficient. It's important to specify that they're also some kind of bakemono, a spectre, with either additional context or a different Japanese word.

When you read kitsune, read "fox". That's what it means, nothing more.

テッドトークに来てありがと。