土神と狐 (“Tsuchigami to kitsune”) tells the story of an earth god who lives in rags, a fox who wears custom, and their rivalry, at least in their own minds, for the affections of a birch tree. Like much of Miyazawa’s fiction, it is a children’s story but has allegorical resonances relating to Miyazawa’s religious and sociocultural beliefs. In this case the usual reading is that the story sees Miyazawa working out his thoughts on indigenous culture and Western-dominated global culture, in the context of Japan’s own partial Westernization. The indigenous culture violently expunges the globalized Western-dominated culture, but it is not actually right to do so because Western culture has values and traditions and a worthwhileness of its own, even if it has a tendency to traipse about where it's not wanted. Commentators on Miyazawa often conclude that his implicit pro-Western stance was developed as a repudiation of an earlier stance that was strongly nationalist and imperialist, hence the allegorical criticism of indigenist attitudes seen in this story.