Due to the fact that Nekomata and Kitsune are different from Inugami, I am going to describe them before writing about Inugami. Nekomata is a cat that develops two tails. Therefore, it starts to imitate different behaviours of human beings for instance: walking on its two feet or making sounds that are similar to the human sounds. However, an ordinary cat can’t evolve in a Nekomata. It has to have some characteristics such as eating human meat or having a long life. On the other hand, Kitsune is a fox that as Nekomata has lived during a long time but the consequence of this, is that it develops a lot of tails. The number of tails in a Kitsune tells the magical power and knowledge of it. Besides, Kitsune is pretty important in Shinto owing to the fact that they are related to the god Inari. Therefore, it can be seen that Nekomata and Kitsune are creatures that do not have a moral meaning, they do not represent elements of war between the light and darkness.

When a dog suffers a terrible death that is made by its owner, a spirit is born and is called inugami. The goal of this spirit is to fulfil all the desires of its owner. This creature is a way to show the importance of the dogs in Japanese culture, where the dog is an animal with similar features of the human, as well as the importance of Kojyutsu , a kind of magic, before the Heian age. As Nekomata and Kitsune, Inugami does not represent an element of the goodness and the evil.

In the Christianity, we can find different kinds of animals for example the peafowl, that is associated with beauty, the Fenix that represents the immortality and the griffin that represents the human nature and goodness nature of Jesus. But all of these symbols try to represent the behaviours that defend this religion. And this fact is very important in the development of this religion due to the fact that catholic religion had to modify itself to convert pagans and the best way to do that was changing the meaning of pagan’s religion.

To conclude, we find that animals in Japanese mythology do not have a meaning related to the goodness and the evil. They are a consequence of the Shinto, that related to the nature of different kinds of spirit and kamis. But the catholic religion uses animals to represent some virtues and vices and this custom is a consequence of one of the methods that Cristian religion use to convert pagans.