The legendary tanuki is reputed to be mischievous and jolly, a master of disguise and shapeshifting, but somewhat gullible and absentminded. It is also a common theme in Japanese art, especially statuary.
Bake-danuki (化け狸) are a kind of yōkai of tanuki found in the classics and in the folklore and legends of various places in Japan.
The original tanuki is an existent kind of mammal, but the kind in literature was written from old times to be a strange animal. As the oldest, in the Nara period, Empress Suiko of the Nihon Shoki wrote such passages as “in two months of spring, there are mujina in the country of Mutsu (春二月陸奥有狢), they turn into humans and sing songs (化人以歌). Next, they were written in such classics as the Nihon Ryoiki and the Uji Shui Monogatari. In various places in Japan, like kitsune (foxes), they shapeshift into other things,shapeshift people, and left tales where they had abilities to possess humans and things like that.
The tanuki of Japan from time immemorial were deified as governing all things in nature, but after the arrival of Buddhism, animals other than envoys of the gods (foxes, snakes, etc.) lost their divinity. Since all that remained was the image of possessing special powers, they were seen as evil or as yokai, with tanuki being a representative type.
Compared with kitsune (foxes), which are the epitome of shape-changing animals, there is the saying that “the fox has seven disguises, the tanuki has eight (狐七化け、狸八化け)". The tanuki is thus superior to the fox in its disguises, but unlike the fox, which changes its form for the sake of tempting people, tanuki do so to fool people and make them seem stupid. There is also the theory that they simply like to change their form.