Greetings yokai fans!

Today’s illustration is byakko, the white fox. Not to be confused with byakko, the white tiger. Yes, they’re homophones, but written with different kanji.

This entry will be a bit different, as I don’t have a full writeup on it to share, and it won’t be hitting yokai.com for some time. The reason for that is that I am still restructuring about 10 kitsune posts for the book, trying to come up with the best format and the best way to distribute information among the many types of kitsune. So I haven’t decided just how to do this one’s write up yet. Since I’m busy working on preparing for the Kickstarter as well, finalizing the kitsune writeup will take a back seat until at least December.

But just to give you a brief description, byakko literally means “white fox” and they are the kitsune who serve Inari. In other words, the Shinto kitsune. When you see foxes at a shrine, they are almost always byakko.

We’ve seen a few examples of byakko on yokai.com. Kuzunoha, the mother of Abe no Seimei was a byakko. Also, myobu is a specific rank of byakko — the elite byakko who serve Inari’s inner court would be myobu. They’re mostly good, but not necessary 100% good. Plenty of byakko still play pranks on humans, before they eventually shed those nasty traits and become more enlightened foxes later in life.

Byakko are one of the “families” of foxes. Other families are marked by their colors as well; black foxes, gold foxes, silver foxes, red foxes. We’ll look more at those soon. For now, enjoy this patrons-only illustration. 🙂