Adventures in Japanese: Testicles
It’s time for Paul’s adventures in Japanese. Today’s story is amazing!
I’ve known from a children’s song that the Japanese word for testicles is 金玉 (kintama) which is literally “golden balls”. It always makes me smile that of course you’d treat your testicles as if they’re made of gold.
Well, it turns out the origin of the word — and one of my favourite Japanese animal tales — is even better.
I’ve long been fascinated by tales of tanuki — a kind of raccoon-dog that’s native to Japan — that are portrayed as having magical scrotums. I am not making this up. There’s a whole bunch of classical Japanese art that has tanuki striking down their enemies with their ferocious ball-sacks:
It turns out the origin of the tanuki’s magical scrotum, and the Japanese word for gold, are related. To create gold leaf, Japanese smiths would wrap the gold in tanuki scrotums before pounding it; apparently the scrotums stretched exceptionally well, allowing the creation of the thinnest gold leaf possible, and also starting the legend that tanuki had amazingly stretchy scrotums.
You can also get wallets made from tanuki scrota, because obviously they’ll apply their magical stretchy powers to your money. I’m not sure that’s true, but mythical tanuki sure seemed to have a lot of uses for their balls, like this great drawing of them all chilling out and using their scrotums for warmth and comfort:
There’s a great article on tanuki and their mystical abilities on tofugu, and a seemigly endless amount of art on the internet. To end, I’ll just leave you with this very innovative and I’m sure extremely comfortable depiction of tanuki boating activities:
Thanks for reading along, and if you have testicles may they be as durable as a tanuki’s!
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