Humanity has used cats in many ways to express and to personify forces of good and evil that it did not understand. The Egyptian worship of cats had its germ in the feeling that they were one manifestation of the divine, and the Celtic tribes of early Europe believed that the demoniac powers which, they thought, surrounded them and threatened them appeared oftenest in the form of cats-large black tomcats. The belief that cats enshrine the spirits of the dead has cropped up in various primitive peoples, but it remained for Japan to give it its quaintest turn.
East is East and West is West, and it is hard for the Occidental mind to comprehend why a cat that is born with a black mark on its back resembling a woman in a kimono is thought to contain the spirit of the owner’s honorable grandfather or great-aunt and is sent to a temple to be kept from contamination by the vulgar. Nevertheless, there have been quite recent examples of this faith in some sects or portions of the Japanese public.
These kimono cats were never given away, or knowingly sent out of the country, but early in this century one was stolen and carried to England. A Chinese servant committed the theft, and he smuggled the cat, a female, aboard an English ship. The captain wanted to return her to the priests of the temple from which she was taken, but so great was popular indignation over the theft that he was afraid to reveal that he had her. And even a British officer might have itching fingers where such a curiosity was concerned.
So the little Kimona sailed for England, and went to live with a family in Putney, who, according to an account Dr. Lilian Veley wrote for Cat Gossip, respected her traditions and gave her a happy home. Kimona was uncannily human in her ways, and decided in her likes and dislikes. She would eat no fish or vegetables or milk, nothing but raw meat. She was not snooty about her past except in one respect. British tomcats she simply could not abide, and she lived and died a spinster.
Dr. Veley took some photographs of Kimona, and they were printed in Cat Gossip shortly before the cat’s death in 1911. The black saddle on her white body might with some stretch of the imagination be thought to resemble a fat woman in a kimono. She had a black mark on her head, coming down over the cheeks, like a cap with lappets. Her tail was black and very short, broad at the base, almost triangular in shape.
There is a statue in Japan that is dedicated to cats, not the sacred kimono cats but the little commoners that are sacrificed to make catgut for the samisen, the Japanese banjo. It stands in front of the great Buddhist temple to Nichiren in the Yamanashi Prefecture, and one of the figures, that of a nun, has a cat’s head. Samisen manufacturers placed it there, not so much from remorse as that they feared that the spirits of the slain animals might return to haunt them and injure the samisen business. Incense is burned there, and prayers are said to appease and propitiate the cats and to assure them that the manufacturers regretted the necessity of making them into samisens.
Even the geishas of Tokio contributed their hard-earned yens to have religious services for the dead cats before the big bronze statue. And I suppose it did the geishas good, if not the cats.
Cats play a more sinister part in some of the remote districts of Japan, where apparently the belief in vampires still survives. In the London Sunday Express for July 14, 1929 there was printed a report that the dread vampire cat of Nabeshima was once more, after a long absence, abroad in the land, seeking to bewitch the wives of the descendants of the old fighting Samurai. F. Hadland Davis in his Myths and Legends of Japan tells the story of this feline vampire that once upon a time harried the noble Nabeshima family.
It slew O Toyo, the sweetheart of the Prince of Hizen, an honored member of the Nabeshima race, and assumed her form, and in that guise sought to destroy the prince. But he was saved by the vigilance of Ito Soda, a faithful soldier, and the vampire, changing into a cat again, escaped to the mountains, where it was slain by hunters sent by the prince. That is the legend, but if we credit the item in the Sunday Express some of the Japanese believe that the creature had a life in reserve. It is to be hoped that it has not the fabled nine lives of our own harmless cats.