This week’s entry: Tama (cat)
What it’s about: A Japanese calico cat who inadvertently saved a railway station in Wakayama Prefecture from closing, becoming both a local celebrity and the station master in the process.
Biggest controversy: Cats are taking jobs away from hardworking humans! In 2004, the financially struggling Wakayama Electric Railway was planning on closing Kishi Station. In 2006 the company destaffed every station along its line to cut costs and named an unofficial station manager from a local business. Kishi Station was nominally overseen by Toshiko Koyama, who had just taken in Tama from a group of strays. Tama quickly became a favorite with commuters, to the point where ridership noticeably increased.
In 2007, the railway gave Tama the title of station master and a year’s worth of cat food by way of a salary. They even made a cat-sized station master’s hat. Ridership continued to increase—by March 2007, traffic at Kishi Station was up 10% over the previous year—and it’s estimated that Tama boosted the local economy by 1.1 billion yen during her tenure as station master.
Strangest fact: In a sad commentary of sexism in the Japanese workplace, Tama quickly became the highest-ranking female employee at Wakayama Electric Railway. By the end of 2007, she had been given the railway’s Top Station Runner Award (in lieu of a cash bonus, she was given a cat toy and was fed crab by the company president). Only a month later, she was promoted to “super station master,” and a ticket booth was converted into her office, making her “the only female in a managerial position” at Wakayama.
Thing we were happiest to learn: Tama’s rise through the company ranks (and the public’s affection) was meteoric. In October of 2008, Tama was knighted for promoting local tourism. In 2009, Wakayama debuted a “Tama Train,” decorated with cartoon depictions of the cat. In 2010, the railway promoted her to “Operating Officer.” Wikipedia says she was “the first cat to become an executive of a railroad corporation,” and we’d love to know if there were cats running other types of corporations that made the distinction necessary. The following year, she was promoted to “Managing Executive Officer,” third in line behind the company president and the managing director.
By 2013, after six years on the job, Tama was named Honorary President of Wakayama Electric Rail for life, although within a few months of the promotion, she reduced her hours at the station due to her advancing age.
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Tama is no longer with us. The cat died in June of 2015 at the age of 16. Thousands of fans from across the country came to Wakayama to pay their respects, the railroad granted her the posthumous title “Honorary Eternal Stationmaster,” and she was enshrined by a nearby Shinto shrine as spirit goddess Tama Daimyōjin.
The railway was well prepared for a future without Tama’s leadership; in 2012, they named an apprentice, Nitama (literally, “Second Tama”), a 2-year-old cat who had been found under a train car at a different railway. After Tama’s funeral, Nitama was taken to her shrine to pay her respects, and then formally named station master. She is often depicted as “endearingly fluffy.” There was also a third Tama, Sun-tama-tama (a pun on “Third Tama”), whose human caretaker refused to give the cat up; in 2017, a kitten named Yontama (“Fourth Tama”) was named as Nitama’s apprentice.
Also noteworthy: Even railways run by cats aren’t immune to nepotism. After her 2008 promotion, Tama was given two assistants—her sister, Chibi, and her mother, Miiko. (How a bunch of stray cats’ family tree was determined isn’t revealed here.)
Also also noteworthy: Tama’s boost to the local economy is part of a larger phenomenon recognized in Japan, “nekonomikusu” (or “nekonomics”), which charts the positive economic impact of having a cat mascot.
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: While it’s doubtful any cats have risen as high in the business world as Tama, some cats have succeeded in the public sector. Number 10 Downing Street has an official Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, the British Post Office of the 1950s and ’60s had a “number one cat,” and in 1997 a tail-less kitten named Stubbs was named mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska. He served in that role for 20 years, more than three times longer than Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla. We’re just saying, we can and have done worse than a kitten vice president.
Further down the Wormhole: Like Herman Cain’s, Tama’s Twitter account continued on long past her death, as the ubiquitous social media hell site has replaced and degraded ordinary human interaction. Twitter is one of a handful of companies that didn’t exist 20 years ago and now shapes every facet of American life, alongside the likes of Google, Amazon, and Netflix. The latter, at least, has given this website plenty to write about while acting as teacher/mother/secret lover to a shattered generation. In 2018 the streaming service launched Dirty Money, a docuseries that focused on financial crimes, including money laundering, payday loans, illegal mining, and Jared Kushner. But they also devoted an episode to the crime of the millennium: The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist. We’ll see what the grandest theft in Canadian history was all aboot next week.
57 Comments
next week, i hope you will also note the great boston molasses flood of 1919.
Wasn’t that a previous Wiki Wormhole? (I realize it would take me like nine seconds to actually determine whether it was or not, but I’m lazy and proud, dammit.)
i believe it was…but you can never mention it enough!
Didn’t people have to go around euthanizing horses that had gotten stuck in the molasses? It sounds like a children’s book based on the name, but that must have been horrifying to see a giant wall of sludge just obliterating everything in the street.
i know, right? & it was hot & sticky & then it cooled into a hard sludge. horses did die.
I actually thought the same thing, but I checked my list of past columns and it’s not on there, and when you search AVC for “molasses flood,” one of the first hits is a comment from me saying “I can’t believe I haven’t covered the molasses flood” the last time someone brought this up. That might make a good 1-2 punch with the Maple Syrup Heist…
They even made a cat-sized station master’s hat.
Outside of the Dr. Seuss Universe getting a cat to wear a hat is basically an impossibility. Gotta say this makes the whole story seem implausible.
We couldn’t even get our cat to wear a collar. We’d put it on, he’d go outside and it would never be seen again. We gave up after four collars so he moved on to showing our other cat how to get one off. In the end we had a collar we’d put on them when they had to go to the vet, so we’d look responsible and not outsmarted by a cat.
Cat collars have a snap link in them, so that if the cat gets caught on something, enough struggling and wiggling will break the rubber ring. Likely after the first, the cat realized that was the key to freedom and repeated the process until it had trained you to accept that it would not be collared.If I remember, you have to collar them very young and even then it’s a 50-50 chance that it will simply snag it on something, break the link and go about doing it’s cat stuff.
Same here; tried it once…cat couldn’t figure out how to get it off, but she acted like she was being punished (I just thought it was a nice fashion accessory!). She’s an indoor cat, so I stopped trying to make her wear it.I DID try getting her in a harness, an, hoo-boy! She did NOT like that! When I finally managed to get it on and got her outside, she just stood by the front door and gave me a look like I was abandoning here…she refused to move, even when I called her.Did take her outside once when it snowed (I knew she wouldn’t run away because of when I tried the harness). Thought she’d like playing in the snow, but NOPE! I even took her paws and swatted the powder a bit to get her to understand, but when I brought her back in she was just cold, wet, and pissed-off.She’s strictly an indoor cat now.
The sentence at the end confused me a bit “Twitter is one of a handful of companies that didn’t exist 20 years ago and now shapes every facet of American life, alongside the likes of Google, Amazon, and Netflix.”Google, Amazon and Netflix all existed in some form 20 years ago.
I assume that is a standard refusal to admit time happens.
One could charitably assume that the list of companies that shape American life was not meant to also be a list of companies that didn’t exist 20 years ago. But yeah, it could have been written in a less confusing way. “…20 years ago. It now shapes every facet of American life, alongside…” would have avoided the ambiguity.
Also, one can argue that while those companies technically existed 20 years ago, they weren’t really the same companies. Google was a scrappy search-engine startup, Amazon was a bookseller, and Netflix was a DVD rental service. None of them were anything resembling the online digital empires they are now.
They existed, but not in the way that they do now. Google was a search aggregator, not the world’s biggest advertising platform and data collection agency. Amazon was an online commerce site that specialized in books, not an all-encompassing retail behemoth that owns a major grocery store chain and manufactures its own goods to compete with other products it sells (Not to mention its Web Services arm, which handles a great deal of the world’s internet traffic.) Netflix was just a service to get a DVD in the mail, not a tech company that also essentially operates as the sixth major Hollywood studio. They all grew very far beyond their original scope, very quickly.
Okay, I could have worded that better.
That’s a good cat
1.1 billion yen is just $10,151,816.40 American.
True, but how many other cats are credited with creating a $10M economic impact?
I was originally going to write “Unless you’re Jim Davis, you should be impressed by a cat generating $10M”.
And that Morris cat from those cat food commercials.
And others, no doubt. But check out “Jim Davis net worth”. The-house-that-Garfield-built is rather luxurious.
“Just”, he says.
Well, the exchange rate between the US dollar and yen is so weird that a billion yen only gets you 10 million American dollars. And, it’s not like Japan is a poor nation.
Nah, not weird, the yen is just functionally equivalent to the cent. The minimum denomination in Japanese currency is a one-yen coin, which I think of like a penny, and the hundred-yen coin I think of like a loonie. Basically there’s no direct equivalent of a dollar in Japanese currency, so instead of ten-dollar bills they have thousand-yen notes, for instance. Which makes carrying cash in Japan feel totally baller when you’re carrying bills with “5 000″ and “10 000″ on them.
Like that one trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe!
They are up to Z$100 trillion bills now. I don’t think I’d feel baller carrying big bills in a country with staggering hyperinflation, though. “Terrified about the future” sounds right.
Oh yeah it’s not worth anything, but it’s just very extreme sounding if you don’t know the actual exchange rate
Venezuela says “hold my beer”…https://tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/inflation-cpi
There used to be subdivisions of the yen, the sen (100 to the yen) and rin (1000), but those got lost in inflation over time.A low value of a single unit of a currency is generally a sign of hyperinflation in the past, but there’s no real standard of what one unit ‘should’ be worth.
I will be happy to accept the paltry sum of just $10,151,816.40 American from anyone who wants to send it my way.
I’ll check under my sofa cushions.
I’d even let them have my cat…
A bit more detail on the story of Sun-Tama-Tama (third Tama) because it’s hilarious:The Wakayama station decided to establish a whole procedure for the Tama line of succession, where, once the current Tama began to reach old age, a new Tama would be chosen and sent off to another station for “training” (and to temporarily boost the other station’s attendance.) Then after a year or so, the young Tama would make a triumphant return to Wakayama and be installed as the new Stationmaster. Except the plan backfired immediately, because when Third Tama got sent to Okayama to train, they liked her so much that they refused to give her back. In an open letter, the PR rep for the station wrote, “I will not let go of this child, she will stay in Okayama.” Third Tama was named Okayama stationmaster and has been there ever since.
I’ve been to Okayama through the station many times, why have I never heard of this?
“Cats are taking jobs away from hardworking humans!”Harold Ramis deserved it.
“nekonomikusu” (or “nekonomics”), which charts the positive economic impact of having a cat mascot.Mike, does AV Club have a cat mascot? I’m just thinking how much one would have helped in 2016………..
I was going to quote the same thing, but more to point out that as weird as Japan is a lot of the time, at least this time it’s endearingly cute.
Abdul Al-Hazred was so misunderstood.
Is Kinja, The Kitten Who Became A Ninja stil around?
kinja was brutally murdered but it’s corpse shambles on
Reminds me the various Jock’s at Winston Churchill’s Chartwell estate:“Since the National Trust opened the house to the public in 1966, the family of Sir Winston Churchill requested that there always be a marmalade cat named Jock, with a white bib and four white socks, in comfortable residence at Chartwell.”https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/chartwell/features/jock-vii-of-chartwell
We’ll see what the grandest theft in Canadian history was all aboot next week.If you find yourself in a country where the natives say ‘aboot’ instead of ‘about’, you’re in Scotland, not Canada.
Vancouver was always aboot the aboot pronunciation.
There’s a moose loose aboot this hoose!
Turn off the noozle! The noozle at the end of the hoose!
The Scots have been stealthily taking over Canada for a while. They even have Sandy McTire on (Canadian Tire) money!
Canada’s more like “aboat,” if anything.
We actually had an editorial discussion of “aboot” vs, “aboat.” I grew up on the Canadian border, and to my ears it sounds more like “aboat.” But “Canadians say ‘aboot’” is a trope most people are familiar with, so I thought the joke might land better that way.
I wonder how that happened. . . .
She is often depicted as “endearingly fluffy.”
I get that a lot, too.
Even today a cat’s life can end on a grill in some parts of China, even though cats are considered lucky.On the other hand, it seems Japanese cats—even the strays—enjoy a much revered status. Not only do the Japanese put stray cats in charge of mass transit, but there are about a dozen “cat islands” which do great business with tourists coming in by ferry to hang out with the feline ruling class.And as happens with so many things, cat cafes were invented in Taiwan but it was the Japanese who elevated them into an art form.
It’s really not at all common to eat cats in China. You would have to search quite a long time to locate somewhere where you could do so, especially in the Covid era, during which lots of exotic animal consumption has been banned. Look at the response a report on cat eating got back in 2015 here:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34682858There is no equivalent to the Yulin Dog Festival for cats, i.e. there is no widespread celebration of cat-eating in any part of China. While it is possible there are still some cats being eaten, the number is likely very small, possibly nonexistent. So for the ~400 million or more cats in the world, their odds of ending up eaten by a human are only a smidgen higher than a human’s odds of ending up a cannibal’s dinner.
I agree that it’s not a common practice today when you consider the sheer size of China’s population, but it does still happen. It may be a small number statistically but it is by no means nonexistent.The BBC story you linked to says, “Eating cat meat is widely regarded as taboo in China, but it is still eaten in some rural regions.” Those are the parts of China I was referring to. Tianjin seems to be a center for the illegal trade of capturing pets and strays to be sold in the rural provinces. There have been several similar police raids there prior to and after the 2015 raid referenced in the BBC story.The BBC story also said, “The news went viral after it was posted on the popular microblog Sina Weibo by influential papers the Yangtse Evening Post and Huaxi Metropolis Daily. Both said rescue teams had confirmed that the cats were to be shipped to Yunnan, Guangdong and Shandong provinces to be used as food.”My comment about Chinese cat meat consumption was driven by knowing someone who adopted one of the cats rescued in the October 2015 Tianjin raid. Many of the cats that were rescued had to be euthanized. Her’s was one of the few that survived and was put up for adoption through Humane Society International.There was another raid in Tianjin in December 2018 after police got more than 1,200 calls from concerned citizens. In that instance, 375 cats were rescued from the illegal slaughterhouse. https://www.hsi.org/news-media/cats-saved-china-121118/
The late Michael Crichton hated the Japanese, women especially in business, and probably cats, so I am surprised he doesn’t have a novel where a thinly fictionalized Tama is the villain
Not as good as the story of the baboon which worked as a railroad switch operator. He actually worked for his pay!
Jaunty, that’s the only word for the angle of that cap, jaunty.