Curious Ordinary

Bunbuku Chagama is a Japanese folktale in which a tanuki shapeshifts into a kettle and uses his talents to reward his owner. The story begins with a priest who bought an old tea kettle from a local store. He polished it up to use for the tea ceremony at his temple. One night while he was sleeping, the monks heard a lot of noise coming from his room and when they looked, they saw that the kettle had sprouted legs, a bushy tail and had the face of a tanuki.

In Japanese folklore there is a tale called ‘Kachi-kachi Yama’ which translates as fire-crackle mountain. Kachi kachi is onomatopoeia for the sound of crackling fire. The story is also more commonly known as ‘The Farmer and the Badger' however the ‘badger’ in this tale is actually a tanuki . 

In Japanese folklore, Oitekebori is strange apparition that takes the form of a human ghost. The story goes that one evening, two fishermen were fishing in a canal in Tokyo and they were catching more fish than usual. As they were preparing to go home they heard an eerie voice coming from the canal calling 'oite ike' which means 'drop it and get out of here.'

In Japanese folklore the suiko (water tiger) is a yokai that lives in rivers, lakes, ponds and waterways throughout Japan. They have a body that is the same shape and size as a small child and is covered in tough scales with sharp claw-like spikes protruding from their knees. Suiko are far more dangerous  than the more well-known kappa .