Tsukimono

A tsukimono is a thing that attaches itself: a fox, a dog spirit, a snake, a weasel, that enters a person and speaks and acts through them. Fox possession, kitsune-tsuki, was treated as an illness through the nineteenth century, with symptoms, diagnoses and exorcisms, and it is the most common animal possession in the records.

The darker side is the tsukimono-suji, a lineage believed to own and send such spirits. In Shimane, Shikoku, Kyushu and elsewhere, families said to keep foxes or an inugami were avoided in marriage for generations, and the belief caused real harm to real people well into the twentieth century. Articles on this site describe that belief as a social fact and do not name any lineage.