About
I am a cat. I travel by shoulder.
This was not my idea. My human acquired a bag with a padded base and a mesh window, decided I would enjoy seeing the country, and did not consult me. I have since revised my objection downward from outrage to conditional tolerance, because it turns out the view from up there is worth the indignity of the bag.
From a shoulder, Japan looks different than it does in the photographs everyone takes. People point their cameras out and up — at the castle, the mountain, the shrine roof. I see the other things. The wall built from broken pottery that holds up a road in Arita. The exact height of a shop cat sitting in a doorway in Onomichi, judging us both. The grain of the wood on a two-hundred-year-old step, close enough to count.
I have decided this is the useful thing about being a cat on a shoulder: I am at the height of the details nobody writes down.
So that is what this site is.
My human does the parts that require thumbs — the trains, the money, the actual writing of the guides, which are honest and researched and will tell you where to buy a rice bowl without wasting your afternoon. Those pages are his. He is good at them. He has bought a great deal of pottery to be this good at them, and the apartment reflects this.
The rest — the looking, the being unimpressed, the occasional and reluctant admission that a place was, on balance, worth the bag — that part is mine.
We go to the towns most people skip. Saga instead of Kyoto in April. The kiln that empties out at five o’clock. The onsen town two stops before the famous one. Not out of contrarianism — my human insists it’s because the good things are quieter there, and I insist it’s because the crowds step on tails, and we have agreed not to resolve which of us is right.
I still have no name. He has tried several. I have declined all of them, on the grounds that a name is a kind of leash and I have opinions about leashes.
But I will show you the country from thirty centimetres up, which is the height at which things are actually happening.
Come along. Mind the bag.
The guides on this site contain affiliate links. My human earns a small commission when you buy through them, which he spends on more pottery, which is how we ended up like this. Everything recommended has been bought, used, or in my case sat upon.