Origins?

Foxes are seen as power animals / totems throughout the world. The Chinese believed foxes could take human form. In Egypt the fox brought favour from the gods. There was a fox god in Peru. Foxes aid the dead get to the next life in Persia. The Cherokees, Hopi and various other Native American Indian tribes believed in its healing power, the Apache credited the fox with giving man fire.

Earliest Records?

The earliest surviving collections of supernatural tales were written from the 3rd century through the 6th A.D. These collections are crude, compared to later accounts, and serve simply to record miraculous occurances that have been witnessed or told of to the writer. The tales deal with immortals, local gods, ghosts, and animal spirits, characters and situations that would be returned to again and again throughout the development of supernatural literature in China.

Origins?

It is widely agreed that many fox myths in Japan can be traced to China, Korean, or India. Many of the earliest surviving stories are recorded in the Konjaku Monogatari, an 11th-century collection of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese narratives.

There is debate whether the kitsune myths originated entirely from foreign sources or are in part an indigenous Japanese concept dating as far back as the fifth century BC. Japanese folklorist Kiyoshi Nozaki argues that the Japanese regarded kitsune positively as early as the 4th century A.D.; the only things imported from China or Korea were the kitsune's negative attributes