Spooky cats are an iconic part of Halloween iconography, so in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe dive into the world of Kaibyō: the various strange and supernatural cats found in Japanese tradition.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And it is October on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, which means the Uncanny Pods continue. And today we're back with part two in a series we started on Tuesday about the monster cats of Japanese legend the cat yo Kai. So a brief recap of what we talked about last time. We covered a bit about the general role of cats in Japanese history, in Japanese culture, and then we discussed a couple of famous cat yo kai altered cats in monster form, including the neko mata, which may be a sort of giant monster cat or general large predator of the mountain forests, or maybe a cat that reaches a certain age, like a domestic house cat that reaches a certain age, maybe the age of one hundred, and then transforms into a monster. We also talked about the bakan Echo, a sort of a moral shape shifting cat that may play pranks, may drink blood, may exact deadly revenge, etc. Does that about cover it.
Roub, Yeah, Yeah, pretty much? And an important thing to keep in mind, this is something we were talking about off Mike before we came in here, is that there's a certain amount of overlap between these different classifications. I mean, more generally, as we've often discussed with folklore and legends and mythology and even religion, that there's not often like a strong canonizing, codifying force that is coming in and saying like, Okay, this is this creature and this is this other creature. You know, things shift over time, Ideas merge, ideas influence one another, and I mean really, if you want to look outside of folklore and mythology and legend to find examples of this, I mean look no further than say, like comic book characters, where like a character like Lex Luthor or the Riddler, you know, have changed multiple times over the years to reflect different ideas in popular culture, with like Lex Luthor becoming less of a mad scientist in a mecha suit and becoming like a corporate businessman and so forth. The Riddler suddenly is the Zodiac Killer in recent films, you know that sort of thing.
Uh huh. I think that's a great comparison. But even in that case, at least the things you're talking about are fixed media documents like you know, comic books and films, which continue to exist in a fixed form. When something is just sort of oral legend and part of a culture, there's almost a limitless kind of free flow of the boundaries of the concept.
Right right, There's no like central publication that is to some extent controlling the form. And you can argue just how much even something like The Riddler is controlled by say, DC Comics, because ultimately you have fan fiction, fan art, et cetera. But yeah, outside of that, you know, we're dealing with with situations where things are just growing organically, often in oral storytelling traditions, and then it gets influenced by various artistic renditions and so forth.
So today we're going to be talking about some more Japanese stories of magical cats. Not all monster cats, but some of them are monster cats. But before we get into that, I wanted to look at something more broadly about the perception of cats as powerful beings. So in multiple sources I was reading for the series, there would be little comments and asides that were variations on the perception that cats just seem to have some kind of obscure hidden power, that something about the nature of the cat suggests there's more than meets the eye. And I find myself intuitively very much in agreement with that. But I would back up and say, even before you get to the assumption about magical powers, I think there is just something about a cat that suggests power of some sort. Like despite the fact that cats are Internet famous for being you know, goofy goobers, cute, goofy goobers, no doubt, they often are just as often when, especially when I'm in the physical presence of a cat, I often feel that a house cat is commanding a strange, mysterious power and respect. And I was talking to my wife Rachel about this and she said, basically she had the same feeling. She said, when in the presence of a cat's it's this kind of a creature that's holding something over you. Specifically, in her case, she talked about the feeling of the need to impress a cat like this is an animal that is passing judgment on you, and you are failing and there might be some kind of bad consequence to the fact that you are not standing up in the eyes of the cat.
Yeah, I mean, when you go over to a friend's house and a dog. The dog may initially bark at you, but you know, as is often the case in my experience, then the owner will say no, no, no, Hugo or whatever the dog's name is, this person is fine, this person's fine, and eventually, in my experience, the dog tends to listen to this and it's like, okay, all right, it's fine the cat. You know, the best you can do when someone comes over is say like, look, I have nothing to do with how this cat is going to receive you. I can give you advice, I can tell you what not to do, but ultimately it's out of my hands.
That's right. Yeah, you know, I'm not the boss here. In a way, so I can sense why people in various cultures throughout history might start to wonder if the domestic cat is brimming with bloodthirsty sorcery, and all it would take is that same feeling. I have that intuitive sense that the cat is powerful for some reason, but paired with the observation that that sense of power is incongruous with the cat's actual physical size and strength. Like you know that that sense of power cannot be justified through what a cat can literally actually do so the mind fills with magic. And I will add that, of course, the comparison to dogs is unavoidable. I love dogs. I am more of a dog person than a cat person, and I would not say this about dogs at all. This seems totally unique to cats. Dogs do not seem to have hidden power or magic in this way.
Yeah, as a cat person, I find that when I encounter a new dog, it's like things often push to one extreme or another. You know, a dog is either suspicious or hostile towards you, or they are just instantly already your friend and want to, you know, get all up in your business and see if you have treats and so forth. And of course you know, on the thread end of the spectrum obviously, as in my first example, a lot of times it's like yeah, the initial barking at a stranger, but then they're like, oh, okay, they're fine. But with the cat, there's often there often seems to be and again this is general, this is generality. Then they're gonna be in vidual exceptions with the cats as there are with the dogs. But they seem to occupy this middle ground, you know, where it's like a no friends, no enemies, approach to relationship.
Yeah, yeah, that's good. But anyway, so this got me wondering, like, why is it that cats seem powerful in this way? I don't know if they seem this way to everyone, but I think at least a lot of people must share this feeling I have. And this turned out to be a difficult question to answer in a way that felt really solid and empirically justified. I don't think I have a great answer to this question, but I've turned up a few possible interesting ideas. So the first place I look to try to get some empirically justified threads on this is I was wondering, well, what are the behavioral markers of power in humans that we might just be sort of mapping on to the behavior of cats. And this is great because you know, the whatever government agencies or whatever are tracking my Internet behavior must now think I'm about to start a second career as one of the psychopath dating advice coaches, because I'm here searching for studies on what makes humans seem powerful? How do humans signal dominance and high status? Uh so, TikTok, masculinity, priesthood, here I come.
I imagine there's a lot out there that equates dog ownership with strength and cat ownership with sensitivity. Uh. These are, of course both ridiculous stereotypes, but you do see this sort of thing reflected, like, look at this guy, he's got a he's got a big dog. Must be it must be a really powerful fellow. Look this, this, this creature is clearly physically powerful, and it just works for him. You know, it's observient to him.
Where is the boss?
Yeah, whereas the cat ownership, you know, is often interpreted in the opposite direction. I guess one of the seasonally appropriate examples is, of course, when when people realized or I mean, I think this was always kind of out in the open, but when people realize that that metal musician Glenn Danzig is a cat person and has cats and buys cat letter, right, people had a lot of fun with that concept because he pushes this hyper masculine identity out there, right, and so it just dealing with like those really like outrageous gender stereotypes. It was like, it seemed counterintuitive that this individual would have a cat. But then again, when you get into all the spooky stuff, right, it seems perfectly logical that he would have multiple black cats.
I feel like I could have told you Danzig was a cat person. I don't know how I knew, but I knew. Yeah.
I think there are old photos of them with cats, long before the kitty litter shopping photo went viral.
But anyway, what did I come up with here? Okay? I think about two ideas that are potentially interesting and one that was kind of a failed rabbit trail. We'll do the failed one first. This idea is about eye contact. I have the impression that something about the way a cat looks at you can feel intimidating, and that there's something about the gaze of a cat that that has to do with this feeling of power that I impute to them. And I wondered if this had something to do with our instincts about eye contact. I think it's absolutely clear that eye contact is one of the most potent and complicated elements of human body language. How much you do or don't connect with somebody's gaze. Who engages and breaks off eye contact and when they do it. These gestures that we make with our eyes are interpreted as containing lots of socially relevant information, And if you doubt this just like try to have a conversation with somebody, but don't do what feels natural with eye contact, like force yourself to maintain eye contact longer than you naturally would or something. It will I guarantee you immediately become extremely uncomfortable and you will both get freaked out for whatever reason. Humans just read a lot into how they manage eye contact with each other. There are a bunch of studies about this, and while there might be a lot of different kind of information encoded in patterns of eye contact, it's clear that one of the important types of social information that we interpret in patterns of eye contact has to do with power, status, and dominance. For example, there are studies showing that, at least in some human on human scenarios, people perceive to be powerful or in leadership roles are more likely to maintain eye contact once it is initiated, so you meet the powerful person's gaze and the powerful person will stare you down. Conversely, people who are perceived in social interactions as subservient or less powerful are more likely to break off eye contact and avert their gaze from that of a person they perceive as more powerful or higher status than them. So I was thinking about this, and I was thinking, what this does feel like It squares with experiences I've had with cats where they will just like stare into my eyes until I feel uncomfortable and feel like I have to look away, And this does appear to be a true dynamic for humans. But I couldn't really connect this to any empirical evidence that cats are especially prone to this, that cats are more likely than any other animal to hit you with a laser beam of unbroken eye contact. Like I said, I feel like I've had this experience before, but I don't think it's generally true of cats. In fact, a lot of like veterinary sources I was reading claim exactly the opposite. They say that cats tend to find sustained eye contact threatening and stressful, and that you should not stare right into their eyes because it will bother them. The reasoning being that that cats only whole eye contact with each other when they are preparing to fight, which would mirror the idea that eye contact has something to do with sort of like a you know, dominance and competition in mammals. So if vets and other experts say that cats generally avoid prolonged eye contact with humans. That's sort of the opposite of what I was wondering about. So I don't know, maybe there's something I'm missing, but I think my intuition about cats was just wrong in this case.
Yeah, I've heard that cats favor a narrowing of the eyes and a head nod, though I've never investigated it to see if there's anything substantial backing it up. But in my limited experience, it kind of sort of seems to work, you know, like if I find myself staring at my cats, sometimes I'll do that, and you know, it seems like we have a cool moment. But in general, though, I would say, in my experience is all very subjective obviously, but cats have very captivating eyes. They have very large eyes. They're the eyes of a predator, you know, an obligate predator. Here. They also are eyes that are finely tuned for work in low light environments. They will appear to gleam, you know, in low light environments, which often has an impact on various supernatural interpretations, you know, eyes gleaming in the night, glowing in the night, and so forth. Whereas with dogs, I don't know, sometimes I encounter dogs, and it's like their eyes feel like they're completely dark, you know, like they're like a doll's eyes, but not in like a threatening Jaws fashion, but in a like this is a stuffed animal fashion, like there's no agency here. This this animal is just just dumb as I'll get out.
I don't feel that about dogs. But yeah, not.
All dogs, just some dogs I have encountered. Their eyes feel very dark and like I don't read them as well, whereas cat eyes are are there, if they're wide open, certainly they're very intense.
Well, I think with some dogs you don't really get to see much other than the pupil, you know, like you're not seeing a lot of the whites of a dog's eye usually, which is something we use to interpret the theory of mind and other humans because, like, you know, when we're trying to understand what other humans are thinking, we look at where they're looking with their eyes, and that necessarily involves being able to see the relative proportion of the whites of the eyes on you know, Like, so we look at where their pupils are pointed. With a dog, yeah, a lot of times, like the darker part of the eyeball like fills up most of what you can see.
Yeah, and a theory of mind, of course, is central to all of this. Anybody who's familiar with animals will tell you that, depending on the animal, it may not be the eyes that are the prime indicator of mood and so forth. I mean ears are especially important in a number of animals, like what are their ears doing, how are their ears positioned? And so forth.
Anyway, Okay, so I think my thing about eye contact that's not really going anywhere. But a couple of other ideas I think might be onto something. One is about elevation. It seems to me that cats often seek to occupy high places in the room, on top of shelves and tall furniture in lofted areas, looking down on others, and unlike dogs, cats are climbers. They can actually get up to the high places. So I think even if a dog wanted to be up on top of the ship, it probably can't get there, but a cat can. Once again, I didn't know if this was a real trend with cats or just my personal idiosyncratic experience. While I looked it up to see if there are any studies on this, and there are, so I was reading in a book called The Domestic Cat, The Biology of Its Behavior from Cambridge University Press two thousand, edited by Turner and Batesen, And they're summarizing some research on this, and they say, quote Smith at All nineteen ninety four examined the behavior of cats in shelters with specific reference to their spatial distribution and object preferences. The cats used structures more often than the floor of their pins, and high structures which provided vantage points, were used more frequently than low ones. Other studies have confirmed that cats prefer high shelves and enclosed areas. So this is not just my gut feeling. Researchers have investigated this and they found that yes, cats do, on average actually prefer to get up high and look down on everyone else. Now pair that with the fact that I think is totally clear that humans frequently use physical elevation to signal power. Think of the elevation of the king or the queen's throne over the throne room, the elevation of the judge's bench over the courtroom, the elevation of the preacher's pulpit, etc. It seems like a common cross cultural reality that when we want to signal that a person is powerful and they must be respected and even feared. We put them up on an elevated piece of furniture. So related to this cultural convention, which in turn might proceed from some biological realities, we regard the entity up in a high place looking down on us as a being with power over us. Cats, on average do selectively seek out elevated perches and high vantage points. So I guess that's one possible contributing factor to our perceptions of the strange power of a cat. And by the way, I was thinking, I can think of any other common domestic animal that is able to do this, like you know, dogs and all the common farm animals and so forth don't climb up on shelves to peer down at us. The only other one I was thinking of was maybe like the goat, which does like to get up on top of the roofs of the pins and so forth.
Yeah, I was about to ask you if you had forgotten our friend the goat, because the goat seems like the most striking example of animals that like, you go out and you'll see you'll see goats in a field and they have access to a hay bale or some other elevated structure. You'll often find multiple goats enjoying that heightened perspective, whereas cats, I don't know, you know, I don't doubt the research here, but you'll find cats enjoying elevated positions, but also shelving and other locations that are maybe less high, that are maybe picked out more because they are enclosed. You know, they're boxy, they're like little caves. Likewise, I mean, you'll find cats being on shoes and so forth with ground level. So, I don't know, it seems less pronounced in cats than with goats. For sure, Goats would seem to be the superstars uh here when it comes to elevated positions, I think the we do often put out uh like little pedestals and throne like structures for them to use, even of course climbing towers and so forth, So we do facilitate, uh, their their you know, their their desire to have some sort of an elevated position, and and also you know that'll end up looking like we have provided a special place for them, a throne for them to rule over the household. Uh Though at the same time, as we've discussed in the show before. They'll also favor say a discarded ikea instruction manual that's left on a bed. Oh, they'll they'll they'll lay in an empty box. So it's I don't know, I feel like they they do what they want. You know, you can't you can't entirely expect them to just go to the highest place. They're gonna also find a comfy place and that on that count, I would also add that one of the things about cats that may make them seem more powerful is the way they will recline in sudden some circumstances, especially if they're say on a couch where they have something to lean their bodies back against. They'll sometimes have this body position that makes them look like a reclining bipedal humanoid. And you know, their belly will perhaps be a little exaggerated since they may be an indoor cat that eats plenty, and this will sort of add to this feeling of a rotund ruler on their throne.
Jab of the cat.
Yeah, but at the very least to your point, Yes, cats will take advantage of various surface levels on which to rest and to you know, view their domain, and a lot of times that will put them a certainly at a higher vantage point, perhaps one that is more on the level with human beings as opposed to just being on the floor.
All right. Another idea I had about cats in the perception of power, what if kats seem powerful because they are non compliant or non conforming. There are multiple studies on this dynamic in humans. Just to refer to one that seems to be cited a lot, there is a study by Sylvia Balsa, Francesca Gino, and a not Keenan called the Red Sneakers Effect Inferring status and competence from signals of non conformity. This is from the Journal of Consumer Research from twenty fourteen. What seems to have incited this research is just some anecdotal observations that run counter to the conventional win wisdom that if you want to be respected, you need to dress sharp. You know. I've heard variations on this my whole life. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, And they don't actually include, like in that statement, what you're supposed to wear, But the unspoken assumption is that this means dress up, not dressed down. You know, where in my case, the uh this is interpreted as wear a tie, shine your shoes, et cetera. But the authors here point out that counter to this conventional wisdom in certain sectors of business and culture they cite observations in Silicon Valley, there seems to be a principle operating in exactly the opposite direction. People in these contexts seem to try to signal their power, competence and high status by dressing down relative to their peers, so like you know, the CEO because they will not tuck their shirt in. You know, they're showing up at the board meeting in flip flops. So that's just an anecdotal observation. But the authors here wanted to put together a experiments to investigate empirically whether in some contexts non conforming behaviors or non compliance with social expectations, whether that does on average confer the appearance of power, competence and high status, and generally, in their experiments, which involve different kinds of you know, like staged encounters you might imagine in a university or business setting or whatever, they did indeed find that sometimes non compliance and non conformity are interpreted by others as signs of power, and they compare non conformity and non compliance with social expectations to a form of conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is a classic concept where people try to show off their high status by showing off that they can afford luxury goods, so, you know, having like expensive jewelry on or wearing you know, something that is impractically expensive, of an expensive car, or something like that to make people think that you are powerful and important. In their discussion section the author's write quote, we demonstrate that non conforming behavior as a costly, invisible signal, can operate similarly to conspicuous consumption, and compared to conforming behavior, lead to inferences of enhanced status and competence in the eyes of others. Across a series of lab and field studies, we explore observer's reactions to a variety of non conforming behaviors in different settings and find that observers confer higher status and competence to non conforming individuals compared to conforming ones. At a process level, our investigation reveals that the positive inferences from signals of non conformity are driven by perceived autonomy and moderated by observer's need for uniqueness. So The theory here seems to be that people interpret non conformity as an honest display of autonomy. Somebody who is not complying with social expectations is sort of conveying I will be fine without your approval, I don't need it, which ironically, in some cases makes some people seem more competent, more powerful, and more worthy of respect. So what are the boundaries of this effect? Because it obviously does not apply in every scenario, The authors in this paper, across their multiple studies, think that. Well, they say, they find that this effect only appears when the observer is familiar with the environment and social expectations within it. So you know, when there are quote established norms of formal conduct in the given context, and when the observer knows what they are. So like there have to be implied social rules in a place, and the observer has to know what they are. They also find that the perception of status and competence associated with nonconformity only appears if the observer believes that the person in question, the non conforming person, is violating the norms on purpose, if it seems like they're simply not aware that they're dressing or speaking inappropriately. That doesn't confer any sense of power. The power comes from willful flaunting of social expectations. So how does this connect to cats. Obviously, cats don't dress themselves or use language, so it wouldn't make sense to talk about them intentionally flaunting expected dress codes or ways of speaking. But I think basically anybody would have to agree that cats exude an air of non compliance and nonconformity, especially when contrasted with other domestic animals like the dog. The dog, of course, you know, highly social and usually quite eager to please. The dog will put on a tie for you if it can, by God. But there is something about the way that like if you try to train a cat. I mean, it's not true that you can't train a cat. Sometimes people do do it, but it is notoriously difficult, and often when people try it on their own, cat just ignores you, often not just ignoring you, but like staring right in your face while it ignores what you want it to do. And I think that does maybe convey a sense of willful flaunting of social expectations that could map on to these intuitions we have about human behavior that when somebody is just like, no, I'm just not going to comply with the social norms. That makes them seem like, oh wow, this is a powerful person and I have maybe I should respect them.
Well, it is true that cats are quite ungovernable, the notoriously so. It's also one of their their charms too, but one of the frustrations of keeping them as well. There's a sticker design out there. I don't know. I get served ads for it all the time on like Instagram, I guess because I look at cat videos and it's though like a cartoon cat with two middle fingers up and it says you can't stop me, which I love because it does perfectly capture the spirit of the cat. They will do what they want. And yeah, like I imagine it's different like if a dog, say, were to poop on your bed, you know this would what would that be?
Like, Joe?
What as a dog owner, how does that go down?
You get the sense that when a dog, I mean all dogs are different, of course, so we're speaking in generalizations, but I think on average dog owners would probably say that a dog can be made to feel ashamed about like that you show the dog that they pooped on the bed. There's a sense that like the dog couldn't help it, it just got caught up in the moment, or it really needed to go and it pooped on the bed. And then it looks at the poop and it's like, I'm sorry. A cat, you don't get that at all.
That's right with a cat. The first part may still obviously be true. The cat could various circumstances just made it to where the cat ended up leaving its poop on the bed, But there is this feeling that the cat is saying, actually, this is where my poop goes. Now, this is just how it is. I have made this decision, and what are you.
Going to do about it? I don't need your approval.
Yeah you don't like it, there, move it. You're the one who handles my poop for me. But yeah, I mean that you encounter this all the time with cats, Like you attempt to get them a new litter that will be better for them and better for the whole household, and they reject it, or you get them a comfy new bed, but instead they're going to go sweep on the instructions for putting together the fancy cat bed that you just bought. You know, they're going to do what they want. They're not necessarily they may do what you want in time, but they're not going to do it on your schedule. They have their own agenda in place.
So to summarize, I don't think I have a comprehensive theory about why cats seem powerful, but I think we got a few interesting ideas there. I think the non compliance and nonconformity thing maybe a big part of it. I think the elevation might possibly be a part of it. I don't think the eye contact thing really goes anywhere, but I'd be interested what listeners think, especially if you have I don't know if you're like a vet you work with cats or anything, or even if you know you just got a lot of cats and you want to tell us about them, Like, where do you think the sense that cats have a hidden power comes from?
I think another area that comes to mind is this sort of idea that there is a vanity, like like a king Lee or queenly vanity to the cat. And I was thinking about this specifically last night because my son and I are I'm slowly reading Watership down to him when we still do some story time. He does lots of reading on his own. But I was like, Watershiped. If you're all into all these animal books, let's do Watership Down. And we were just reading a part in this in which the rabbits encounter a cat. A cat in Watership Down is a deadly illegal in one of the thousand enemies of the rabbit people, but in this encounter they managed to outrun the cat. And one of the rabbit's comments that the cats quote hate to look foolish, and this matches up with a lot of the things that unseasoned cat behavior. They will often seemingly walk off stumbles and mistakes with the kind of nonchalant that didn't happen vibe. This is of course all theory of mind and personification on our part, but that's how we often end up interpreting it. So the cat may seem prideful and powerful in a way, you know, kind of like eager to cover up a stumble it made, when of course, in reality, the cat is just doing some mix of just recovering from whatever they did wrong and moving on or conserving energy instead of wasting you know, time focusing on it. It's also coming back a little bit to the the subjects that we discussed in the last episode, this idea of cats catching on early in Japan with royalty, with nobility, and you have this, this this clear mental picture of a Japanese emperor, someone who is in a position where I'm you know, I'm imagining there's a lot of a lot of yes men surrounding them, there's a you know, a lot of power, there's a lot of things being done in such a way as to please the emperor, and then into their life strolls a cat, which you know is adorable and interesting, but also is not going to do what an emperor wants a cat to do. Like again, they are ungovernable to the last of them, to a fault. Even so, I think it's interesting to imagine that scenario and being part of there, and it's almost like they occupy would have occupied, like this gesture's place in the presence of the emperor, Like, here is a creature that will not do whatever I want, And in a way, there's something liberating about that.
I think that's a really good comparison. Yeah, like the power of the jester, like the one who can criticize the king because they're a goober.
Yeah, all right, now, coming back a bit to Japanese lore and legend and tradition concerning cats. I want to get into a few other ideas here. I want to mention again that two of my primary sources here are kaid Yo The Supernatural Cats of by Zach Davison, and then also a book titled The Japanese Myths The Guide to God's Heroes and Spirits by Joshua Friedman. The first cat I want to touch on, I think I may have mentioned this one in passing, but is the cat is the Meneki neko, the inviting cat. This is a cat that I think everyone a cat statue if you will that I think everyone has seen, probably in person, probably in multitudes at times. And if you haven't seen one in person, surely you've seen an image of this. This is a little statue of a cat gesturing with it with a face down paw, welcoming good luck into a space. A lot of times these are like solar and or battery powered as well, and so you get that little motion of the inviting paw.
I don't think I knew what this was called, but I thought of this as the lucky cat, and it kind of has a in some forms. It has a paw that waves like the lever of an old school cash register.
Yeah, that's right. Its origins are in the Edo period, when it was apparently observed that cats sometimes manipulate their paw in this way that resembles the Japanese traditional hand gesture to come inside. I think in Western traditions it's often easy to look at that and think of like waving or like you say, pulling a lever, But in Japanese tradition, I believe this would be more like, yeah, come inside. And the cat then is welcoming good luck generally inside a home or business. They are not, and I can't stress this enough, not welcoming in vampires. So if you are a vampire out there, do not misinterpret a luck cat as being an open invitation to come inside, because it's not gonna work.
I can't believe this has never come up before when a vampire has to be invited in? Does that apply to places of business or only to homes? And if it applies to places of business, is the open sign welcome enough or does it have to come out of a person's mouth.
I don't know. It depends on the interpretation. Yeah, if it's by appointment only. I think the vampire cannot come inside all right. Now. As for the lut cats, though Davison shares several more tidbits, I wasn't familiar with any of this. I'm going to stress though, that there's no real cannon here regarding what any of these details mean. And some you'll apparently find traditions that are the opposite of some of the standards here. But in general, you look at one of these lut cats, you may see a red bib or collar. This is a symbol of Buddhist divinity. Oftentimes you'll see it holding a coin, a gold coin. This is from the Edo period as well. It's got a cobine. It represents like vast wealth. And I think there's also this idea too that is kind of like, as Davison points out, like pearls before swine. You know, it's like a coin for a cat is something that a cat cannot actually appreciate, but it's kind of fun that it has it.
The cat would rather have a lot of aluminum foil.
Yeah, the colors mean a lot. Apparently. You often see white ones. A white luck cat typically means happiness. It's inviting in happiness. Red color real it's inviting in relationship success or and or protection from illness. The black color is protection from evil spirits. Gold cats obviously mean money. But then there are all sorts of newer colors that have apparently been introduced just in general popular culture, like blue for academic success, green for health, pink for love, and then calico apparently is considered the luckiest of all, I guess because you get a combination of colors and calicos of like luck associations like traditionally in Japan, also depending on which hand is doing the waving, some traditions say left hand invites in money, right brings in customers, though sometimes apparently this is reversed so it depends who you're asking about it. Right is for home, left is for business, left hand. It also apparently has a connotation with holding one's liquor, which apparently ties into the idea, particularly with a luck cat in a restaurants, of keeping clients drinking so that they're ordering more food. But again that nothing is there's no strict canon or coat here. You'll find various interpretations of this. Again, origins go back to the Edo period. You would have these motionless clay models, and there are a number of stories that lay out how these clay statues came to be. There are some stories apparently in which you have a situation where a hero is saved from ill luck or attack by a becketting cat in the night, and therefore after the fact they're like, oh, well this cat saved my life, will I will now honor it. There's one story that Davison relates in which there's like a samurai protecting this woman. They're going through the dark streets at night. This cat jumps out. He thinks it's a threat. He slays the cat and then realizes, oh, this cat was protecting us or warning us, and then he feels vast guilt and a shrine is built to the cats. There's also a cat temple origin story of sorts. There's an actual cat temple in Japan. Gotukuji, i believe is what it is called. So the cat is apparently, in some traditions, said to be one of only two animals that did not weep upon the death of the Buddha. I've seen it also put other ways that like the cat does not accept the Buddhist teaching, et cetera. Whatever, the details. You know, it matches up with the spirit of the cat. The cat does not seem likely to be greatly emotionally disturbed by the death of even the Buddha, and also is going to be rather neutral on Buddhist teachings.
The cat is like, I will keep my attachments, thank you very much.
Yes, But the story goes that, okay, cats are not really lined up with the spirit of Buddhist teachings. Therefore they're not a great animal to have at a holy site. But the story is that a monk kept one anyway because it was cute and adorable, et cetera, et cetera, so he hides it from the abbot there. But then one night during a storm, the cat invites a powerful lord to the temple for refuge, and that temple, Kotukuji, becomes the Cat Temple and today hosts thousands of luck cats. You can find various pictures of this place online and just yeah, tons and tons of white luck cats.
Wow. I'm looking at a picture you included in the outline, and it looks like drifts of snow with strawberries.
Yeah, yeah, there are a bunch of them. Now again, we discuss that there's a lot of overlap with these different stories about the cats, supernatural cats of Japan, and this general idea that there's kind of an evolution. A cat becomes old enough, a cat becomes one hundred years old, and then the tale splits. It becomes something else. More tails mean more power, power even to change its shape and take on human form, manipulate aid, or hunt humans for sport, that sort of thing.
Oh and when you said this, I just realized I forgot to mention when I did the recap at the beginning that yes, the Neko mata has a forked tail or two tails, that's like primary characteristic. I left out apologies about that.
Now, while a lot of these ideas with supernatural cats are or they become the idea that this is something that a normal cat can and will turn into. One exception to this is the idea of the Neko Musumi. This is the cat Daughter, and Zach Davison discusses this in the book The Cat Daughter in Question. Here is a cat human hybrid, but her origin isn't situated in the domestic cat at all. She's not a former domestic cat that is transformed into this state. She's also attributed with certain acts that are feline in nature, like cat bathing and killing of rodents in line with their feline qualities. Now, as Davison lays out the origins of this one in the path of his evolution, kind of walk us through a couple of centuries of weird tales and oddities in Japanese culture. The earliest version of the tail stems from the Missy Momo or Seeing Things shows in the seventeen hundreds. These, he writes, were quote a combination of American freak shows, haunted houses, and the believe it or Not style of exhibitions still popular today. So amid so this would be a situation for you to encounter various Jokai artifacts, including the original Fiji Mermaid, which originated here in this setting and then ended up traveling into the West. But this is where the original cat Daughter is said to have existed. It's unknown, however, if this was somebody that had a birth defect, if it was somebody who had been made up with special makeup or lighting or of it's with some combination of different elements. But there was supposedly an individual that was the cat Daughter, and you would pay to see them are.
There even any physical descriptions other than that in some sense, some vague sense, she looks like a cat.
I don't think so. I think we don't have a lot to go on here, based on my reading of Davidson. So the Misimomo shows they die out, maybe they're no longer popular. But the story here of the cat Daughter comes back during the Edo period in the Kaidan or ghost story collections, sometimes she's called the Licking Girl again because she's half cat half human and she does things that a cat will do, like bathe herself by licking or fur, and of course killing various rodents that's also huge. But again her origins in these cases are still mysterious. Nobody's saying that she was a domestic cat at one point. She's just this anomaly, and apparently it counts. During the Edo period also sometimes present her again as a historical fact. Davidson points out that there's like one particular work that's primarily a historical and political diary and they just refer to the Cat Daughter as a fact, like this is a person that exists or existed, which I guess makes sense if its origins are in this Missy Momo seeing things show, but then things continue to evolve, and finally, in the nineteen thirties, the story takes on this form of a Buddhist morality lesson. So, in this story, you have a father who makes his living producing cat skin shamasin's. This is a stringed instrument that was sometimes traditionally made with cat or dog skin. And so in this story, the father has killed something like five hundred cats in his trade to make these nice musical instruments that he sells. But this ends up cursing his bloodline, causing his daughter to be born as park cat.
So this is something kind of like a harmic punishment.
Yeah, exactly. Now I want to point out there are also illustrations of the Nikomata from the seventeen hundreds. We talked about the Nikomada in the last episode, which depicts this creature in sort of like a cat humanoid form playing a shamasen and this was, I guess apparently amusing because the shamasin might have been made out of cat skin. All Right, the next one I want to discuss very briefly. I don't think I'm gonna go into this one much, but if you happen to be on any of our social media profiles, you may have seen an image selected to promote this episode, and it consists of what appears to be just a giant chonker of a cat, maybe not even leaping, but just sort of reaching out of the high bushes and small trees to swat at a human or a pair of humans and cause them great agony and fear.
Elephant sized cat rising like steam out of the weeds.
Yeah, and the cat, I love his this very sort of neutral look on its face, like it doesn't look fearsome. And there are plenty of depictions of cats taking on you know, sort of evil and terrifying facial features, but this one, this cat looks very neutrals as he sort of you know, emerges from the bushes, and yeah, he's a total chonker. Very much reminds me of the cat meme of Oh laud he coming. I don't know if you've seen this one. This is the highest level on the chalk spectrum for how chonky a cat may be.
I'm not familiar, but I understand the concept. Okay.
This picture is a nineteenth century image from Kawan Nabi Kyoshi. This is supposed to be a giant cat attacking people in the forest. Now, this is supposed to be a depiction of the aeromote o ya maneko or the aeromote great mountain cat. So this is a remote island of Japan, and it is indeed home to a small aerio mote cat, a subspecies of leopard cat that is only found there. It's critically endangered. It is not giant, but there are legends of a much bigger cat with shining eyes that lives in the mountain. So, you know, I guess you could say it's kind of a cryptid of Japan. And you know, who knows if there is there's anything to this. Again, cats when they're you know, they may have that appearance of glowing eyes in the dark. And you can imagine how just just sighting one of these normal small wildcats, what could have led to this idea that there's something bigger lurking in the wilds.
I was thinking about this after we recorded part one the other day, because of course, the world is full of actual big cat predators, lions, tigers, leopards. You know, these these are large predatory felines that can can could really mess you up. But it seems that the idea of taking like, even if you live in a place where there are no large predatory cats, you could almost like invent the idea yourself just by looking at a house cat and thinking, wow, this we're bigger and stronger. I'd really be in trouble.
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's that's obviously always a concern with cats. You know, there's always the joke about like, if a cat we're larger than a human, you know, you would just eat you, that sort of thing. Yeah, but yeah, I guess it's always you never want to err just entirely on the side of oh, well there's a tradition in this culture of a giant animal, that giant animal certainly existed, because obviously that's not always the case. I mean, because the human imagination is powerful enough to imagine large and small versions of any animals. There are no giant man sized spiders in Japan, but there are still stories about them exactly.
Yeah, And we make this point a lot on the show. Sometimes weird stories and myths and legends do go back to some kind of historical event that maybe is getting altered through retelling. It doesn't have to be that way. You don't have to assume that every crazy story goes back to something that really happened. People just are creative people make things up.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's really a disservice at times to the to the human imagination and to and also to the traditions of various peoples to say like, oh, well, they clearly didn't think of this on their own. It must have been encrypted or Another version of this, of course, is the idea like, oh, look at this weird thing in their art. It has to be ancient aliens, like when you when you do that. There are a number of problems with the ancient aliens. I bought this, as we've touched on many times before, but a big one too is like you're you're doing a disservice to whatever traditional society you're commenting on by saying that this thing that they that they imagined, interpreted, that you know, has this important role in their belief system. When you just say, oh, that's that's people from another planet. That's not nothing they did. This is nothing that is a part of them. This is something external to them.
Right, And of course that applies to like real human accomplishments, you know, buildings and structures, saying like, oh, people couldn't have done that without without alien help. That is wrong, misguided, not an appropriate reaction to the evidence, and it is insulting to you know, people who worked hard and we're clever. But also it applies to stories. You know, stories were say like, oh, you know, this being came out of the water and it had these physical features and all those things. There's no reason you have to assume that that's based on people actually encountering some being. They didn't understand. People were creative in the past, just like they're creative now. People today make up stories about fantastical beings and beasts. They did then too.
Right, But then again, you know, we are creatures that live in the natural world, and we are often inspired by the natural world, and we kind of get back into that. In the final example, I want to highlight here this may be one of my favorites. It is the idea of the Kasha. This one's interesting because in its origin it is not a cat at all, but a terrifying flaming cart with or without only attendants, so terrifying you know, troll like demon beings attending it or sometimes not attending it. It comes down from the sky to drag away the souls of sinners who are living in the end times, drag them down to Hell and its many torments, because the cycle of reincarnation has run its course. You know, there's everything is broken, so it's time for the hell cart to come and just drag people away. Or at least that's how Kamakura Buddhists of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries apparently viewed matters. But much later, during the eighteen hundreds, you have influential yokai chronicler Tori Yama Sekan coming around. We've talked about him before because a very influential figure in sort of laying out what various yokai looked like and also just straight up making things up, like very much like creating on his own. I think we've touched on some of these before. Where when you many yokai have you know, very you know, cultural origins within the larger culture and in traditional folk beliefs and particularly in rural areas, but also in many in urban areas as well. But sometimes Sekan just sort of made something up because it was clever, or you know, it commented on some social or political element of the time that sort of thing. So he comes along and he reinterprets the Kasha as a cat creature covered in flames. They fear some cat creature, and Joe, I've included an image of the Kasha here as a yokai for you.
That is brutal. The flames are coming off of its sideways.
M Yeah, and there's these wonderful like Japanese flames that kind of feel like like tendrils or tentacles, you know, like they're they're reaching out to grab you. There's also this kind of like spiral motif behind it, like it has just come out of a warp from the hell domains. So, yeah, a fearsome creature come to get your soul.
I guess the sideways flame suggests like a whipping wind or a storm or something.
Yeah, so a very chaotic entity. And according to Davison, this is purely a product of Sekan's creativity, but his work was again highly influential, so it stuck. The Kasha was now a flesh eating animal spirit, and especially for the wicked. The idea is that during your funeral possession, a great wind may blow everything over, knock over your casket, open up the casket, your body comes rolling out and then in swoops the kasha to consume your corpse.
Wow.
Now, eventually those Nikomada stories we talked about in the first episode, they end up influencing this kasha legend, making it a normal house cat that has been transformed due to its proximity to the human dead. So allow a normal cat to access a dead human body and they will try transform into a kasha and drag it away, you know, and you know, it may its tail may split, and all the other motifs that we've discussed. But something about being near the dead body, or drinking blood of the dead, or you know, licking the body of the dead as something of this nature will cause this transformation. Now, in the last episode, we mentioned that stories concerning the bacan eco in the dead, how these were were probably linked on various levels to observations of post mortem predation of human corpses by cats. Now it's not just cats, Dogs and other pets have also been observed to do this, to have a little to eat off of a dead human body. Apparently dogs wait a while and are a little more concerned about it in regards to cats. I think cats do it. I didn't look up any hard data on this, but Davidson ALUs to this. But at any rate, cats will get in there and have a little to eat off of the dead.
One of the probably disturbing realities to humans coming on the scene is that I've read when this happens, the animals, including cats, often go for the face first.
Yeah, and it's not personal, it's just nature. Cats are meteors. But this is a case where the Kasha legend seems to be linked to these observations as well. So you get this idea that, like, look, keep the cats away from the dead, or they will interfere with them, which on one level is yes, absolutely true. They will. They will probably have a little bite, they will investigate the meat. And you can imagine how this takes on fantastic exaggerated proportions, the idea that the cat is not just going to eat of the dead. The cat may do something more directly that impacts the soul of the deceased. They may drag them to hell, they may take on the form of the deceased, or as pops up in story concerning both the Kasha and the Nikomata, they may leap over the body, and in doing so they kind of unleash invisible strings that then reanimate the dead.
They raise the dead through invisible strings. Wow, I love that.
Yeah. Yeah, So here we have a very uh you know, necromantic view of the powers of the cat, you know, and uh and it and again it's it's fascinating because yes, it is fantastic, and it ties into all these other ideas in the given culture here, but also a lot of it is vested in just our experiences of living with cats. That cats do seem to have this this secrecy, this neutrality, and they do things at times that seem to imply some some darker agenda, some some hidden system of rules and laws that govern their behavior, you know, either in this world or the next.
Uh.
They're they're, they're they're constantly fascinating and constantly forcing us to wonder, like, what are they up to? What are they on about? What's their whole deal?
Well, Rob, I have greatly enjoyed this exploration of the various magical cat morphs and altered cats of Japan.
Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. And next week we'll have an all new exploration for the Halloween season. I don't think we've entirely decided what it is yet, but it'll be awesome. Trust us now. On another note, I mentioned social media earlier. Go check out our various social media presences if you haven't had a chance, because they're all back up and running. You can find them all linked on stuff to Blow Yourmind dot com. We are STBYM podcast on Instagram. If you use any of these things, go check them out. If you don't use any of these things, hey, don't go sign up for them because we said we were using them.
It's not worth it. But if you're already there.
If you're already there, it's a way to keep up with what we're doing on the show. You may notice that we have some new host photos. You can see new photos of Joe and myself. These were taken at the Museum of Illusion Atlanta. I did delightful and educational attraction located in Atlantic Station here in Atlanta. This facility features a whole host of visual illusions, including illusion rooms you can walk into and interact with. They also have cameras there and also you can bring in your own devices, take your own selfies, and enjoy all sorts of strange illusions, mirror unreal reflections that sort of thing, Joe. We had a really good time looking into various infinity mirrors. There's even an upside down room. You remember this one.
Yes, I really enjoyed the hatch that goes down forever. It gave me evocations of the House of Leaves.
Yeah. Yeah, that was a really fun one. We tried to get some photo We got a few photos there, but it was really hard to capture that infinity feeling. But yeah, Museum of Illusions Atlanta, it's fun for all ages. You can learn more about it at MOI Atlanta dot com. Oh and while we're at it, Hey, it's Halloween season. We have a new logo design for the Halloween season. You can get it on various merch if you go to our merch store, go to stuff to Blow Yourmind dot com and click the store tab. You can also find images of this on our various social media accounts. But it's the Stuff to Blow your Mind logo but with some various occult images added to it, and you can get that on any shirt color.
Get one in time for Halloween.
Yeah, get a sticker, get of whatever else they make.
Yeah, if you want one, don't let us pressure you.
Come on it's there for fun. It's there for fun.
If you want, how do you say, well, what's the most non coercive way to encourage people to buy? Go buy, but you don't have to but go buy.
We made something that we think is fun, but it's totally optional.
It's not required.
In the meantime. Hey, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you know where to find us anywhere you get your podcasts. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we have a core episode. On Mondays, we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we usually do a short form artifact or a monster Fact episode. There will be a Monster Fact episode next week, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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