Comment by riffraff

17 hours ago

There's a Japanese anime from the '70s called something like "rascal the racoon", based on an American book, which tells the story of a kid with a pet raccoon.

I've wanted a pet raccoon since I saw this on TV in the '80s, and raccoons aren't even a thing in Europe :(

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riffraff

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gyomu  15 hours ago

And the anime was so popular it led to raccoons being imported en masse to Japan and becoming an invasive species when their owners released them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascal_the_Raccoon#Impact

  • NalNezumi  10 hours ago

    I learned about this 2 years ago when a racoon showed up in Tokyo close to where I lived. [1]

    wild to think they spread even all the way to Japan because of anime. and probably south Korea now. They banned raccoons in Japan but it seems to not have caught up in SK and there are a lot of racoon pet videos from SK on YouTube)

    [1] https://youtu.be/P2yDY5HlUBw?si=YP_Bkd_oQZ86YOHt

    • hyeonwho4  9 hours ago

      There use to be "Raccoon cafes" in Seoul. You go buy a drink and pet the raccoons. IIRC animal cafes were banned around 2019 or so.

shawn_w  15 hours ago

Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era. I had that book as a kid. There was a live action Disney film of it; didn't know about the anime version. Neat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascal_(book)

  • IAmBroom  9 hours ago

    A generation of us grew up deeply coveting a pet coon, and have never given up on that dream, really...

    The shocker for me was the bit about Rascal learning not to wash his sugarcubes before eating (or actually, to rinse once, because he was OCD about washing his food). Not that itself, although fascinating and charming; the idea that sugar was rationed to the author's family was mindblowing to juvenile me.

    • QuercusMax  2 hours ago

      I haven't read the book but it seems that this was wartime rationing based on what I read about it on the wiki article?