The Cat Who Runs A Japanese Train Station

Aaron Gilbreath
13 min readJan 22, 2020

And the tourists who just have to visit him, because #CatLife

Nitama in his bed. Photo by author.

On our honeymoon in Japan, my wife Rebekah and I stopped at the coastal city of Wakayam to see a cat. Thousands of people voted the savory tonkotsu shoyu broth at Wakayama’s Ide Shoten as Japan’s best ramen. And on our train ride back to Osaka, we stopped for that ramen, but we really came for the cat.

Aaron Gilbreath

Essayist, Journalist, Burritoist. Longreads Editor. Writing: Harper’s, NYT, Slate, Paris Review, VQR, Oxford American, Kenyon Review. 3 nonfiction books.