S P O T ／ SPOT-015

Shigaraki Giant Tanuki Colony

信楽巨大狸群しがらききょだいたぬきぐん

The humble, wide-bellied, sake-jug-holding tanuki (raccoon dog) figurine — a fixture outside every izakaya and sake shop in Japan — was born in Shigaraki. This unassuming town in the Kōka hills of Shiga Prefecture is the origin point of Japan's most ubiquitous ceramic mascot, and it celebrates that fact with the kind of maximalist enthusiasm that only a town with a single defining product can muster. Stepping off the Shigaraki Kōgen Railway (itself a charming piece of rural nostalgia) deposits you in a world comprehensively colonized by raccoon dogs: they line the station platforms, flank the shopping streets, crowd the gallery gardens, and occupy every conceivable surface of the Tanuki Village (Tanuki-mura), the town's main attraction. The figures range from canonical to experimental — some the size of garden ornaments, others as tall as a person, a few in frankly inexplicable colorways. The collective effect of all this pottery-animal accumulation — rows and rows of wide-eyed ceramic creatures smiling in unison — tips from charming into faintly uncanny in a way that is deeply, specifically Japanese.