How to tell a Japanese tanuki apart from a regular raccoon soranews24.com

And I learned that in Japan there’s an animal called the tanuki.
As a matter of fact, some of the Japanese-English dictionaries and vocabulary lists I looked at said that tanuki were just raccoons.
Tanuki are technically “raccoon dogs,” classified as members of the family Canidae, making them closer relatives to dogs, wolves, and foxes than they are to raccoons.
Still, the visual similarity between tanuki and raccoons is strong enough that it can be hard to tell the two species apart, unless you’ve got a handy guide like this one.
Shared by Japanese Twitter user @namagaki0521, the side-by-side comparison shows a raccoon on the left and a tanuki on the right.