There's a twisted Japanese folk tale called Kachi Kachiyama.

In it, an old man catches a tricky Tanuki, or a raccoon dog. He then ties it to a tree

to kill and cook it later. When the old man leaves, the Tanuki promises his wife he'll

help her if she sets him free. She does so, but the Tanuki kills her. The Tanuki then cooks

a soup with her flesh, shapeshifts to disguise himself as the wife, and serves the soup to the husband.

The Tanuki then taunts him as a, quote, flesh-eating old man.

But it turns out that a rabbit was a good friend of the couple. The rabbit challenges the

Tanuki to a life-or-death boat race. The rabbit carves its boat out of a tree trunk, but the

foolish Tanuki makes his boat out of mud. The race in the lake starts at his nip and tuck,

but then the mudboat starts to dissolve in the middle of the lake.

And then, well, here's a clip from bilingual English.

The raccoon's mud boat fell apart and began sinking.

Stop it! I'm sinking!

You tricked the old woman, cooked her, and had Grandpa eat it.

This is payback.

Take that!

The raccoon went glug, blug, blug,

and together with his mud boat, he sunk to the bottom of the sea.

So yeah, pretty twisted, but also pretty popular.

For instance, the Shokoku-Tunuki train line railway station in Japan still uses the slogan,

Our trains aren't made of mud, a clear reference to the folktale.

And the moral of the story is that our bad deeds will always come back to bite us, making us sink in our own boat made of mud. At trial, the state's

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