Osan Kitsune

The Osan Kitsune is attested as a local folktale of Hiroshima Prefecture associated with the Eba neighborhood. The narrative form preserved in published summaries describes a fox spirit who presents as a woman carrying an infant along a road later named Osan-dōri; she solicits aid from passersby, entrusts the child to someone, then disappears, and the child is found to be a stone. The tale is embedded in the local landscape: a road called Osan-dōri, the vicinity of Satsuyama Park in Eba, and a small statue near the Eba streetcar stop are explicitly associated with the legend in the cited sources. The sources present the tale as a localized instance of the broader kitsune motif rather than as a cosmogonic or cultic origin myth.

In the recorded summaries the Osan Kitsune appears in convincing human form, specifically as a woman carrying an infant. The deceptive infant presented to helpers later proves to be a stone. The story's surviving public markers (the road name Osan-dōri and a statue near the Eba streetcar stop) reinforce this human-with-child guise as the defining visual motif of the local legend.

The sources attribute only limited, encounter-based capacities to the Osan Kitsune: convincing disguise as a human woman and the production or substitution of an apparently human infant that is actually a stone. The tale records an act of deception through plausible human appearance and object-substitution; no broader powers, recurring violent behaviors, or ritual effects are described in the supplied material.