The Cat Who Runs A Japanese Train Station
And the tourists who just have to visit him, because #CatLife
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.
People referred to Nitama as the Stationmaster Cat. He spent his days inside the small rural Kishi Train Station among the low houses and flooded rice fields, snoozing on a cushion in the old ticket window.
Nitama translates as “New Tama.” He succeeded Kishi’s original Stationmaster Cat Tama, who died in 2015 after eight years of lounging and wearing a stationmaster hat. Tama’s calm calico face and enviable sloth endeared her to locals. She’d lived outside a nearby grocery store in Kishikawa, where the shop owners fed her. When she started spending time around the Wakayama Electric Railway’s Kishi Station, people started coming to visit. That gave employees an idea: appoint her their official mascot to draw visitors to its far rural terminus.
Opened in 1933 to service suburban and rural areas, fewer and fewer people rode this train line. In 2004, declining ticket sales forced the railway’s owner, Nankai Electric Railway, to close the…
