U+72E2 "狢" CJK Unified Ideograph-# Unicode Character
U+72E2 "狢" CJK Unified Ideograph-# is a Chinese character typically pronounced "hé" in Mandarin and "kaku" or "baku" in Japanese, and it primarily represents a raccoon dog, a small canine native to East Asia, though it is also used more broadly to mean a badger or a ferocious animal. In classical Chinese texts, this character sometimes appears interchangeably with the character "貉" to denote a wild dog-like creature associated with folklore and nocturnal habits. The glyph's radical component on the left side is the animal radical "犭" which signifies a beast, while the right side "各" contributes phonetic and semantic nuances. In modern usage, particularly in Japanese, "狢" may refer to the tanuki, a culturally significant creature often depicted as a trickster in folklore, though it is less common in contemporary Chinese writing.