Feline features stare out from the covers of umpteen novels, they have an officially designated day devoted to their mystique and popularity, and have outnumbered dogs as pets for a decade.
The influence of cats is evident across every corner of Japanese society, with a recent report crediting them with generating an expected ¥3tn ($18.8bn) in value to the Japanese economy this year – a phenomenon dubbed “catnomics”.
The power of the paw is especially evident in one retro neighbourhood of Tokyo, where on a recent afternoon North American, Australian and European visitors milled around the capital’s self-proclaimed “cat town”.
Yanaka Ginza, a neighbourhood in north-east Tokyo, is seeing a tourism boom fuelled by its historical association with cats, Japan’s most popular pet. Photograph: Justin McCurry/The Guardian
They had been drawn to Yanaka Ginza, in the city’s north-east, by its historical association with cats, whose image adorns shopfronts and street signs, and where visitors can eat cat-shaped sweets and design personalised hanko seals on a similar theme.
The crowds and the warm weather appeared to have kept Yanaka Ginza’s furry residents out of sight. Instead, visitors paused at souvenir shops to buy “lucky” black cat fridge magnets, postcards, chopsticks and crockery.
Cats surround a local woman on Aoshima Island in Ehime prefecture in southern Japan. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
“There have always been cats in Yanaka because there are lots of Buddhist temples here,” says Yumiko Yamashita, owner of several cats and of the Neco Action store. “In the old days they roamed around and even went into different houses, but they’re less visible these days. They prefer to stay indoors on a hot day like this.”
The global boom in Japanese literature has turned the cat into a marketing juggernaut, more than a century after Natsume Sōseki wrote one of the country’s best-known novels, I Am a Cat, told from the point of view of a household cat.
Cats figure prominently in the surrealist novels of Haruki Murakami, and in dozens of other works, notably Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles and Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat. Publishers have even exploited feline marketing power to create covers for books that have little or no connection to the animal.
Clawing in the money
In a nation of pet lovers – where domesticated dogs and cats outnumber children aged under 15, Japanese households kept 8.8 million cats in 2025, compared with 6.8 million dogs, according to a survey by the Japan Pet Food Association. The average cat-owning household, the survey said, spends almost ¥1.8m ($11,300) over the course of their moggy’s life.
Yanaka Ginza, a neighbourhood in north-east Tokyo, is seeing a tourism boom fuelled by its historical association with cats, Japan’s most popular pet. Photograph: Justin McCurry/The Guardian
It is that level of devotion that makes cats big business. In his most recent report on “catnomics”, Katsuhiro Miyamoto, professor emeritus at Kansai University, estimates that animals will add just under ¥3tn ($18.8bn) in value to the Japanese economy in 2026.
Combining estimates of consumer spending at cat cafes and on items such as photo books with sales and salaries among cat food manufacturers and related companies, Miyamoto noted that the estimate fell just short of beating the economic impact of the 2025 World Exposition in Osaka.
He added, though, that cats were still generating “a comparable economic effect, demonstrating the significant contribution cats are making to the Japanese economy”.
High-profile cat owners in Japan include the emperor and empress, and the prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has expressed a preference for cats over dogs.
Nature’s most Zen-like creatures
Cats are believed to have been introduced into Japan during the Nara period (710-794) via Japanese envoys returning from Tang Dynasty China. Many were taken in by temples, where they protected religious scriptures from hungry rodents – a role that imbued them with a special, even mystic, status among their human counterparts.
A cat jumps for food offered by a tourist as other cats beg for food on Aoshima Island in Ehime prefecture in southern Japan Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
Cats are nature’s most Zen-like creatures, effortlessly achieving an aura of calm and detachment that mere mortals spend an entire lifetime trying, and failing, to attain.
“Cats don’t live for the moment; they live in the moment,” the Japan-based author Stephen Mansfield said. “Dwelling neither in the past or future, their minds are likely a lot less cluttered than ours.”
Dog lovers will disagree, but Japanese folklore casts cats as wholly benign beings, whose natural compassion can be a harbinger of good fortune – qualities encapsulated in the maneki neko – a statue of a cat, its paw raised in the expectation of “catching” any luck passing its way.
The porcelain statues are thought to have been inspired by Gōtokuji temple in Kyoto where, as legend has it, a wealthy feudal lord was out hunting when he was caught in a fierce storm. After sheltering beneath a tree, he spotted a cat beckoning him from the steps of the dilapidated temple. As he approached the animal, a bolt of lightning struck the spot where he had been sheltering only seconds earlier. In a show of gratitude, the lord bought the temple and restored it to its former glory.
Maneki-neko statues, also known as beckoning cat, are seen at Gtokuji temple in the International Cat Day in Tokyo on 8 August. Photograph: Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images
These days the maneki neko are a common sight in shops and restaurants whose owners hoping for their Gōtokuji moment.
Like their cousins on depopulated Aoshima, Japan’s cats can only thrive as long as there are enough humans to sustain them. With long-term population decline now a near inevitability, the country’s ageing demographics could soon see significantly fewer cats being kept as pets.
But for the time being, Japan’s felines have every reason to feel like the cats that got the cream.
AloJapan.com