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Apothecary Diaries Fox Masks
2025-05-07 09:40 pmThe opening sequence for the new season looks like management said “integrate AI into your workflow” and someone maliciously complied by using a fox mask they found on thingiverse. This mask is bothering me. Not only because it looks so out of place by being a three dimensional vector in an otherwise two dimensional animation, but also culturally wrong? And surely Apothecary Diaries as a show has done some stuff that's anachronistic and probably culturally odd for something that's set in a fictional Chinese court drama while written by someone who clearly isn't Chinese. This fox mask is pushing my suspension of disbelief into glaring authorial oversight.
When I look at the fox masks in the opening and in Episode 41, they look very distinctly Japanese. Maybe I'm just biased, but my first instinct is those are Inari 稲荷 masks. My second gut reaction is some sort of theater thing.
Through the power of not-google, I can confirm both of those.
The problem arises in trying to prove there's enough overlap between Japan and China to actually make any recommendations about where it came from, whether that should be from Noh/Sarugaku or the traditions around the Peking Opera. I did rope another friend into this and we came up empty handed.
The other potential avenue is folk religion. Inari is a shinto kami. It seems unlikely that she specifically is an import.
...Sifting through all the existing folklore about foxes and trying to segregate native Japanese stuff from imports seems like either a PhD level task of a fool hearty one, not sure which yet.
Nine tailed foxes are a Chinese import to Japan. That's a good sign.
Hu2 Shen2 狐神 looks like a slightly better sign. Hu Shen leads also to Hu Xian, spelled both 狐仙 and 胡仙. They're both the same tones so this might be a result of multiple people transcribing oral histories and not having a consensus. Poking around, I also dug up 五大家仙 wu3 da4 jia1 xian1 (and variations thereupon) which seems to be a group of 5 immortals with jurisdiction over the home. Sounds a bit like Roman Lares.
Unfortunately, Chinese folk religion is a "barrier" I just have not been able to overcome. (Kiseki fans laugh here)
And I suspect that most of the information on these has either been lost in the Revolution or just not written down. Whatever is written down, it's likely not accessible in English.
From the image searching my friend and I were able to do, we weren't able to find iconography that was fox enough to tie back to those masks.
I've hit a dead end.
When I look at the fox masks in the opening and in Episode 41, they look very distinctly Japanese. Maybe I'm just biased, but my first instinct is those are Inari 稲荷 masks. My second gut reaction is some sort of theater thing.
Through the power of not-google, I can confirm both of those.
The problem arises in trying to prove there's enough overlap between Japan and China to actually make any recommendations about where it came from, whether that should be from Noh/Sarugaku or the traditions around the Peking Opera. I did rope another friend into this and we came up empty handed.
The other potential avenue is folk religion. Inari is a shinto kami. It seems unlikely that she specifically is an import.
...Sifting through all the existing folklore about foxes and trying to segregate native Japanese stuff from imports seems like either a PhD level task of a fool hearty one, not sure which yet.
Nine tailed foxes are a Chinese import to Japan. That's a good sign.
Hu2 Shen2 狐神 looks like a slightly better sign. Hu Shen leads also to Hu Xian, spelled both 狐仙 and 胡仙. They're both the same tones so this might be a result of multiple people transcribing oral histories and not having a consensus. Poking around, I also dug up 五大家仙 wu3 da4 jia1 xian1 (and variations thereupon) which seems to be a group of 5 immortals with jurisdiction over the home. Sounds a bit like Roman Lares.
Unfortunately, Chinese folk religion is a "barrier" I just have not been able to overcome. (Kiseki fans laugh here)
And I suspect that most of the information on these has either been lost in the Revolution or just not written down. Whatever is written down, it's likely not accessible in English.
From the image searching my friend and I were able to do, we weren't able to find iconography that was fox enough to tie back to those masks.
I've hit a dead end.
