Tamamo is neither fox nor jackal
In Fate, what animal species is Tamamo-no-Mae? Most people think of her as a fox. Some people will know that in Fate/Extra, she calls herself a jackal (all the way back in 2010!). But, while much closer, that's also not the entire truth.
You see, Tamamo is a śṛgāla.
The evolution of Buddhism across Asia
Wait what. What is this section. This is a post about a fictional fox wife character, what's going on. No, but please humor me for a second.
Buddhism is… let's say, something like a reformist movement based on Hinduism. It adopted many of its same doctrines and systems of belief, while rejecting and modifying others.
Buddhism was funded in India. Then it arrived to China in the 1th or 2nd century, where it blended with native traditions like Daoism and Confucianism. Then it was transmitted from China to Korea in the 4th century, and then from Korea to Japan in the 6th century, where it blended with native Shinto beliefs. (All the dates are estimations. Even historians disagree.)
The important things to note are, first, that Buddhism moved from country to country in a chain: from India to China to Korea to Japan. There are other countries involved, like Vietnam, but we're going to focus on the India-Japan chain here.
Second, Buddhism never quite "replaced" existing traditions, rather it blended with existing local beliefs via syncretism. At every step along the way, Buddhist beliefs would adapt to fit with a given country's native traditions.
In Sanskrit, the term śṛgāla (शृगाल) just literally mans jackal. As in the animal, specifically the Indian golden jackal. I don't now Sanskrit, but according to Wiktionary, "śṛgāla" is pronounced kind of like "shri-gaa-luh".
Jackals are scavenging animals that haunt cremation grounds, stealing offerings and feeding on corpses, plus they have a creepy, piercing nocturnal howl. So in most mythologies and folklore, jackals have negative associations, specially with death and tombs (think the Egyptian Anubis?).
In India, jackals are usually portrayed as cunning and opportunistic, and linked to death. In Hinduism and Indian Buddhism, jackals are associated with deities like Kali and Chamunda, goddesses that reside in cremation grounds.
But at this point, the śṛgāla is just the real animal (plus symbolism). It's not, strictly speaking, a mythological creature.
Buddhism then spreads from India to China. An so translators would take Buddhist texts and begin to translate them from Sanskrit into Chinese. But they find a problem: the texts sometimes mention jackals (śṛgāla), but jackals aren't native to China. So what do they do?
They do a direct phonetic transcription, even if the resulting word has no meaning in Chinese. The Sanskrit term śṛgāla gets transliterated into Chinese as yěgān (野干). (At least according to biologist and folklorist Minakata Kumagusu. I don't get it either.)
The result is a sort of composite canid creature that doesn't have a clear identity. The texts will describe a wild canid that travels in packs, can climb trees, and howls at night (all actual jackal behavior), but is also evil, eats humans, and serves deities of death (not actual jackal behavior, one hopes). This mixes real animal attributes with mythological ones, weakening the link to the original jackal.
Then, since China pretty much doesn't have jackals, this yěgān gets conflated with canids of similar descriptions that DO exist in China, like foxes, martens, and dholes (the dhole is a small wild dog that resembles a fox). The link to the fox in particular is important, because the fox was already a deeply established animal in Chinese folklore, with the huli jing (Chinese shapeshifting fox spirits).
So we move from real animal to… vaguely mythological creature, reinterpreted through local folklore.
So now Buddhism reaches Japan. And again, there are no jackals in Japan, so what do we do with the yěgān? First, the same characters "野干" that are read in Chinese as yěgān, are read in Japanese as yakan (on'yomi reading).
Just like in China, Japan had a strong tradition of fox-related folklore with the kitsune / youko. Initially, the term "yakan" actually was just a synonym for "fox" used by Buddhist monks and diviners. The yakan then merges into the broader Japanese kitsune tradition, because it fitted neatly with the beliefs that already existed about them.
Separately, there exists the word yako (野狐) used for a wild fox or a spirit fox. And it just so happens that yako also had an alternate old spelling of yakan (野犴). So when śṛgāla was transcribed phonetically to China as "yěgān", that didn't correspond to anything, so it was seen as a new creature. But when it was transcribed to Japan as "yakan", it just so happened to coincide with the pronunciation of a term that was already in use to refer to magical foxes. Funny coincidence.
By this point, the original meaning of "jackal" is completely lost, because the concept of the yakan has been inherited purely through language. So now the yakan is a supernatural beast linked to foxes, or even just literally a fox.
Okay, but what does it mean
The compound 野干 (yěgān / yakan) is made of two characters. The first (野) means "field" or "plain" or "wild". The second (干) can mean "to dry".
The above literally doesn't matter. Again, according to folklorist Kumagusu, yěgān is just a phonetic transcription of śṛgāla. Whoever translated this was like, what Chinese character sounds like "ye"? Maybe "野". And what character sounds like "gan"? I guess "干". So there you go. Pretty sure those characters were chosen purely for sound, not because "dry field" has any relevant meaning. I could believe the 野 (wild) to have been chosen on purpose, but the 干 (dry) is likely there only to complete the pronunciation.
No, but seriously, what does it mean
I think it's faster to just directly translate the entry in Weblio (a monolingual JP dictionary):
https://www.weblio.jp/content/%E9%87%8E%E5%B9%B2
ya-kan 【野干 / 射干】
1 - The name of a legendary evil beast in China. It's said that it resembles a small fox, is good at climbing trees, and possesses a night cry similar to that of a wolf.
2 - Synonym for "kitsune" (fox) or "yako" (wild fox).
3 - A type of Noh mask. A demon mask representing the face of a fox. Used in plays such as Kokaji (The Little Blacksmith) and Sesshouseki (The Killing Stone).
4 - Another name for the blackberry lily plant.
The fourth entry is irrelevant. The first and second entries repeat what I explained above, that yakan refers both to the mythological beast and the literal fox. But it's the third entry that's really interesting.
Noh is a type of theater with emphasis on dance, which often involves masks. Weblio gives us two examples of noh plays that use this kind of yakan mask, and both are plays involving foxes.
The Little Blacksmith is a story about swordsmith Munechika, who is commissioned by the Emperor to forge a sword. He prays at a shrine to ask for divine assistance, and then receives the help of a mysterious boy, who is eventually revealed to be the deity Inari, a god of agriculture and foxes. (Also, Inari sometimes gets syncretized with Tamamo-no-Mae, though this is rare. But there exist Tamamo-Inari shrines IRL.)
The Killing Stone is… yeah, that's the story of Tamamo-no-Mae as a noh play. The earliest versions of her tale ended with her unceremonious death, and it's this noh play that introduced the concept of the Killing Stone, which would then become a permanent part of Tamamo's mythology.
So the association between Tamamo and the yakan does not come out of the blue.
Dakiniten, a demon-turned-goddess of Indian origin, is either a yakan herself, or is depicted riding a yakan. So when all those beliefs arrived to Japan, since the yakan is now a fox, Dakiniten became syncretized with Inari, god of foxes. So the śṛgāla/yěgān/yakan goes from being a lowly jackal demon in India, to being a sacred messenger of one of Japan's most important gods. (Then Dakiniten gets further syncretized with Amaterasu, which is what causes the indirect Tamamo-Amaterasu link.)
So the "yakan" is a literal jackal in India, an ambiguous mythical beast in China, and a literal fox in Japan (except foxes in Japan are mythical shapeshifting creatures).
So what animal is Tamamo?
There are, to my knowledge, three separate instances of Tamamo being referred to as a yakan. Two in 2010… and one in 2026.
The first and most well-known one happens in Extra, not long after Tamamo's Noble Phantasm unlocks. Hakuno asks her what she is exactly, if she isn't just an ordinary fox. I'll be going over the relevant dialogue line by line. The provided translation is the official English one.
まあ、そうは言っても、基本的には狐なんですが。
I'm a fox, mostly.
白面九尾だの式神の王だの、そういうのは後付けというか、噂の尾ひれと思ってください。
Just like the magical nine-tailed foxes in Japan folklore, yep.
The localization is a massive oversimplification, but I really don't envy the official translator here. If I try to retranslate it:
Stuff like the Nine-Tailed White Face or the Shikigami King, how to put this, those are things that were added on later. Please think of them like embellishments to the rumors.
She first mentions two spirits in Japanese folklore.
One is the hakumen kyuubi (白面九尾), or Nine-Tailed White Face. The term hakumen ("White Face") is strongly associated with powerful fox spirits, in particular Tamamo-no-Mae and Daji. They have many other similar names like Golden White Face (konjiki hakumen, 金色白面) or Golden-Furred White Face (kinmou hakumen, 金毛白面). Tamamo uses any of these three names interchangeably to refer to the facet of Amaterasu she descends from.
The other is the Shikigami King (式神の王). The shikigami are the spirits that onmyouji sorcerers use. But I cannot find any information on this supposed King? Google returns literally 5 hits, and 1 of them is people discussing Tamamo.
The closest thing I can think of is that shikigami can be bound to ofuda (paper talismans), which miko (shrine priestesses) also use. Which is why Tamamo fights using ofuda, because she's a miko (well, she was actually a nyokan / lady-in-waiting, but those did share some ritualistic duties with a miko, so they're distant cousins). Also, the most famous onmyouji is Abe no Seimei, whose mother was the kitsune Kuzunoha (no relation to Tamamo).
In any case, she says that "stuff like those two are later additions". In particular she uses 後付け (atozuke), which means appendix or postcript. She's saying that she wasn't originally those beings, but rather they were tacked on later.
Then, there's a Japanese idiom "to add tails and fins" which means to exaggerate or embellish (like how a fish story gets bigger every time it's told). She's using that "tails and fins" (尾ひれ) here, as a kind of sneaky pun since she's talking about tails and foxes. And she asks Hakuno to please think of all the above as just "embellishments to the rumors".
Basically, she's saying that she wasn't originally those kinds of things, but later embellishments added that connection. (This actually maps to IRL, since in the original myths Tamamo was two-tailed, and was only seen as nine-tailed centuries later.)
そもそも私、厳密にいうとヤカンですし。ダキニ天っていうか、イナリ明神っていうか。
I mean, strictly speaking I'm a yakan. Like Dakini or the great goddess Inari.
Hey, recall how I talked before about Dakiniten and Inari, about how they are yakans/foxes? Turns out that wasn't filler! (In JP she mentions Dakiniten, not just Dakini.)
Hakuno:
ヤカン？ヤカンっていうと、あのヤカン？お湯を沸かす？
A yakan? Those Japanese tea kettles?
In Japanese, it just so happens that yakan is also the common word for "tea kettle".
Caster:
んー、安直。ご主人様にしては残念なボケです。
Hmmn, is that some kind of Freudian slip, Master?
Funnily enough, she's actually kind of roasting Hakuno here. Retranslation:
Hmn, that (joke) is a little too obvious. Master, you don't make for a good boke.
In manzai comedy, you have the tsukkomi (straight man) and the boke (funny man). Normally, Hakuno would be the tsukkomi to Tamamo's boke, but they're switching roles here. She's basically saying "Please, stick to being the straight man, let me do the bad jokes."
ヤカンは野干。野に干すと書くのです。この響きに覚えがないのでしたら、ジャッカル、と言えばどうでしょう。
Don't you know what a yakan is in Chinese buddhism? Would it help if I were to say jackal instead?
Yakan spelled as 野干. Written as "drying in the fields". Since that term doesn't seem familiar to you, what if I say "jackal" instead?
But I prefer the official localization, even if it's less accurate. Explaining the kanji doesn't make sense in English. And since an English audience would not be familiar with the concept of the yakan, the added reference to Buddhism helps. The only issue is that the localization specially singles out "Chinese" Buddhism, which comes out of nowhere.
Hakuno:
ジャッカル？あれって狼の一種じゃなかったっけ？いや、それより何より、昔の日本にジャッカルはいない筈だ。
Jackal? Like that species of wolf? But I didn't think those lived in ancient Japan…
And you'd be right, Haku!
Caster:
そうですよー。なので、姿形が似ている狐が、私の通説になったのです。
That's riiight. That's why people mistake me for a fox!
Good, but a closer retranslate:
That's riiight. And that's why, since its figure resembles that of a fox, that became the prevailing view for what I am.
This is exactly what I've been explaining! The yakan was originally a jackal, but since Japan didn't have jackals, the yakan became associated with the next closest thing, the fox. I like that Nasu is explicitly referencing that here.
ま、どっちにしろ野干も狐も真体じゃないんで、狐扱いされても問題はありません。
And since I'm not really a yakan either, I don't mind being treated like a fox.
To be exact, she's saying that neither the yakan nor the fox are her shintai (真体), which is something like the "true form" or "true essence".
She then compares herself to Anubis, reveals herself to be a goddess, and Hakuno decides to drop the topic since Casko seems a bit uncomfortable about her past.
Moving on. The second instance of Tamamo being called a yakan also happens in Extra, in her Matrix info for the entry "Dakini Deva" (『ダキニ天』). This entire entry is extremely esoteric so I won't translate it fully, but the relevant part (which gets completely omitted in the official localization), is at the beginning:
元来、“玉藻の前”は巷間に九尾の狐といわれるが、厳密には野干（ジャッカル）であり
To begin with, while "Tamamo-no-Mae" is commonly known among the public as a nine-tailed fox, strictly speaking, she is a yakan (jackal)
As in, they literally write "yakan (jackal)", with "jackal" inside parenthesis.
And that's all we had to work with for 16 years… Until chapter 94 from the FoxTail manga dropped:
Which, really, is more of the same, up to copying some lines from Extra word for word. This page is basically a summary of everything I've talked about so far.
Zoologically speaking, she's a jackal/śṛgāla, specifically an Indian golden jackal. This is what ties her to Dakiniten. It's also worth noting that the Golden White Face (Amaterasu) dresses in Indian clothes.
Culturally speaking, she's a fox/yakan. When Buddhism reached Japan, the "yakan" slot in the cultural imagination was filled by the closest local equivalent, the fox. And recall that "cultural imagination" can become truth in the Throne of Heroes. This is what ties her to Inari.
Metaphysically speaking, well, it's complicated. She does say that neither the yakan (jackal) nor the fox are her shintai (true essence). Well, of course, because she's technically not an animal at all. She's a Divine Spirit.
I don't think the question of "What animal is Tamamo?" even necessarily makes sense? Tamamo is a product of syncretism. She's not the literal jackal or the literal fox. Maybe she's the yakan itself, the very concept of the Buddhist shapeshifting canid creature that evolved through all of Asia.
tl;dr: Let's say she's a fox, because that's what she prefers and no answer is entirely wrong.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%87%8E%E5%B9%B2
https://kotobank.jp/word/%E9%87%8E%E5%B9%B2-647627
https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/shrigala
https://www.wisdomlib.org/concept/jackal
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