Some foxes are shape-shifters even turning into trees. This is because their wealth was supposed to have come from trickery. Families that suddenly became rich in villages in Japan, were feared as fox-owner families. Such families are known as fox-owner families. This enables the family to sell them, repeatedly, in different forms, helping them to become rich. As soon as they are sold, they return to their fox state. There are stories of foxes turning into different animals, allowing a poor family to sell them to make money. If you get hold of this pearl, the fox will promise you anything, if you return it to them.

This pearl is either located in their mouth or in their tails. Some of the stories speak of how the foxes have their souls trapped in a pearl. But their husbands longed for their return, because they were such good wives. They served them well until village dogs barked at them, forcing them to return to their true fox forms. There are stories of fox-women falling in love with and marrying men. But in the morning, the man realised he was in the middle of a crematorium all the food he had been given was actually garbage collected by foxes. There are stories of trickery-like when a musician was once stopped in the middle of the road by a family, who asked him to entertain them. People encountered them in lonely spaces. They were associated as the spirit gods of Inari, the goddess of rice and fortune. In Japan, fox spirits remained generally benevolent. The magical female fox would drive emperors mad, force them to take foolish decisions, causing an uprising in their kingdom and their downfall. The magical male fox would seduce young women with gifts that it would steal, thus destroying their morals. However, in later stories of Chinese mythology, the fox spirit becomes a darker, malevolent force. The oldest Chinese stories show the nine-tailed, white fox as a benevolent being, associated with the goddess of the West. The stories spread as far as Japan and Korea. Such creatures came to be associated with many folklores full of mischief, seduction, trickery and even violence. But, in its journey from an ordinary, red, field fox to the divine, white, nine-tailed fox, it became a mysterious, shape-shifting creature, male or female, benevolent or malevolent. A white fox with nine tails would eventually become divine. Therefore, with the passage of time, an older fox would turn white and grow up to nine tails. Its colour would change and its tails would multiply.

In ancient China, the belief was that as the common red fox grew older, it would get supernatural powers. Published on 29th November, 2020, in Mid-day.

Real 9 tailed fox