Lucky cat (maneki-neko)

Where the maneki-neko began is disputed, and several places in Tokyo tell a story of a cat that beckoned. Mynavi News visited three of them in 2014, Gōtoku-ji in Setagaya, Imado Shrine in Asakusa and Jishō-in in Ochiai-Minami-Nagasaki, and concluded that which is the true root remains a mystery.

The best known is Gōtoku-ji’s. In the temple’s own telling, a lord returning from falconry passed by and was beckoned in by a cat sitting at the temple gate. While he rested inside, thunder broke and rain began to fall. Spared the storm, and pleased with his talk with the priest, the lord was deeply moved by his luck. He was Ii Naotaka, lord of the Hikone domain, and with his support the temple was restored in 1633. Retellings sharpen the story: the Japanese culture magazine Waraku has Naotaka escape a lightning strike. The temple calls the cat maneki-neko, written 招福猫児, “the cat that beckons good fortune”, and enshrines it in a hall of its own, the Shōfukuden.

Imado Shrine’s legend, as Mynavi News tells it, is of an old woman in the Edo period who was too poor to keep her cat and let it go. The cat came to her in a dream and told her that if she made its likeness as a doll, good fortune would come to her. She made cat figures in the local Imado ware, sold them in the grounds of Asakusa Shrine, and grew rich. Jishō-in’s story is set earlier: the warrior Ōta Dōkan, losing a battle and lost on the road, was beckoned to the temple by a cat, turned the battle in his favour, and gave the temple a cat jizō. Waraku adds a story from the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter. The courtesan Usugumo’s cat Tama was beheaded by her master, and its flying head killed a great snake hiding in the privy; a patron had a cat carved for her in precious aloeswood, and one theory holds that copies sold around Asakusa became the maneki-neko.

The figurine itself is surer ground. Waraku calls it the accepted view that maneki-neko figures began with Imado ware, pottery made on the west bank of the Sumida river since the 1570s, and a picture book by Utagawa Hiroshige published in 1852, now in the Edo-Tokyo Museum, shows a fair near Asakusa Shrine where a courtesan is looking over maneki-neko for sale. Staff at the Maneki Neko Museum told the crafts company Nakagawa Masashichi Shoten that the figures were later sold as charms outside Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, and that pilgrims carried them home, so that cats came to be made all over Japan. Seto began making them between 1897 and 1906. Tokoname, about 50 years after Seto, designed a plump, simplified cat for mass production, and during Japan’s years of rapid economic growth that cat spread across the country as a charm for business and became the standard form. On it, the bell that cats had worn at the neck became a koban coin.