The Beckoning Cat Temple
You’ve seen them everywhere, especially in Asian restaurants: small statues, which portray a cat sitting up and beckoning with its front paw. Sometimes the paw is actually waving (with the help of batteries).
Well of course there’s an interesting backstory.
When we booked a month’s stay in Tokyo our friends were aghast, asking: “What are you going to do for a month?” Are you kidding, you can only scrape the surface of that giant megapolis in a month. Every day was an adventure.
About a week into our adventure, we heard about this “cat temple” so one day we decided to track it down, not really knowing what it was about. I suppose we could have gotten some insight if we’d Googled it, but where’s the fun in that? We knew it would be something out of the ordinary but it’s much better to be surprised.
Our first clue that something was going to be, shall we say, different, was the train that took us there. It was covered in cats. Not actual cats but drawings of cute, fuzzy felines. Yes, there’s a special “Maneki Neko” (meaning beckoning cat) train. There were paw prints on the floor in the cars and the grab bars were shaped like cats.
After a long ride, passing further out of downtown, we finally reached our stop. (We were sure we were at the right stop because a giant Maneki Neko waved at us at the station exit.) Or at least we were in the vicinity of our museum. But because this is Tokyo and we were out in the ‘burbs somewhere, the English signs disappeared. So that entailed wandering around looking for some inkling of a cat museum sign.
The thing about traveling as an English-speaking person is that when you are in the tourist bubble (that is around the primary sights) there’s always enough English spoken that you can bumble through. But once you leave the bubble it’s a little more difficult. I mean really, do we expect everyone in the world to be fluent in English? Apparently so.
But that’s not reality, so most people we asked for directions stared at us with that confused deer-in-the-headlights look when we asked where the cat museum was. What made it worse was that Japanese people are very polite and they really want to help you but it’s often way beyond their ability to do so, and you could see their frustration in their eyes.
So instead of causing more pain for those wanting-to-be-helpful locals, we just wandered around until we found it. Yes, I know, Google Maps should have taken us there effortlessly but, trust me, there are places in the world that their very thorough mapping team hasn’t drilled into. (Sometime I’ll tell you about a few square blocks in Madrid where Maps sends you around in circles.) And it would have helped if we’d referred to the actual name of the place instead of calling it “the cat museum.”
We could have saved a half dozen Tokyoites a lot of pain if we’d asked where Gotokuji Temple was.
Gotokuji Temple is a Buddhist temple that is the birthplace of the maneki-neko, or “luck-inviting cat figurine.” According to legend, in the early 17th century, Ii Naotaka, the second lord of the Omi-Hikone Domain, was caught in a sudden thunderstorm. A cat living at the temple invited him inside, away from the storm.
That happens to me all the time. Whenever it rains.
In gratitude, Naotaka dedicated the temple to the Ii clan and after his death, the temple was renamed Gotokuji, derived from his posthumous Buddhist name, “Kyushoin-den Gotokuten ei-daikoji.”
The temple has since been filled with lucky cat figurines donated by worshippers, symbolizing the cat's enduring legacy of good luck.
At some point (exhausted from our trek) we sat down on a bench where people had left their own beckoning cat statues, often tributes to loved ones. That’s how the temple filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of these little waving statues. Over the years, they just kept adding shelves and storage.
Okay, by now we are pretty wiped out so we head back to the station. As we get to the platform, we watch the cat train pulling away. And the next train is due in 45 minutes. We are hungry as mountain lions but we don’t want to wander too far and miss the next train. The only restaurant in sight is a tiny pizza restaurant. We sigh and think, “A pizza in Tokyo?” No way.
But it was that or some vending machine snacks so we head over, plop down at a table, and order the simplest pizza—a margarita. I mean how bad can they screw up a simple margarita. Right? Trust me, restaurants in even the greatest culinary meccas, (yes, you France) can screw up a pizza.
Minutes later, a steaming pie lands on our table. I can smell the warm tomatoes, with gooey mozzarella on top and glistening with olive oil. Surprise, surprise, it was perhaps the best pizza we’d ever eaten.