While moving this week’s focus, in these end-of-year posts on pets, to Asia, I learned that Japan’s national broadcaster NHK has a wonderful YouTube series called “A Cat’s Eye View of Japan.”
It features various scenic locations that are also home to lots of domestic cats.
They don’t allow embedding but here’s the playlist — it has sixty videos currently!
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This connection between people and cats in Japan goes back a long way, perhaps all the way back to the introduction of Buddhism in the 500s AD.
Domestic cats might have come to the islands then, given the traditional use of temple cats to keep rodents from destroying the sacred texts, which were written on leaves.
Cats were owned by (or owned) Japanese aristocrats until the 1600s, when they were released into the streets to fight a pest infestation that was threatening the silk industry.
In 1798, the artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi was born. Cats were one of his most popular themes, including paintings of cats arranged to spell out “catfish,” posed to illustrate proverbs, and presented as a homage to Hiroshige’s “50 Stations of the Tokaido.”
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Note that some of the cats in those lovely images are tailless or have bobtails, like many Japanese cats, while others have the regular tails seen on western cats that, by that time, had arrived in Japan on trading ships.
Down through the centuries, that native bobtail look was admired, preserved, and today has been enshrined in a fancy breed.
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A few facets of Japan’s cat culture are internationally known outside the cat fancy, including the beckoning lucky cat —
— and cat cafes:
About that 3D cat…
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We foreigners enjoy Japan’s cat culture in many ways, but to see it from the inside, check out that NHK playlist. Sayonara!
Featured image: Edu Snacker/Shutterstock
Flight To Wonder 