After Everyone Left, the Cats Stayed

Tashirojima is a small island in Miyagi Prefecture where the cats have outnumbered the people for years. The human population has been declining for decades—the young leave for the cities and don’t come back, which is the story of most rural islands in Japan, and arguably most rural islands everywhere—but the cats stayed. They multiplied, established their own geography, and now they move through the space the people left behind: watching the remaining fishermen from the docks, wandering the empty classrooms of a school no one attends anymore, doing whatever cats do at the top of a hill in the middle of the night.

I keep coming back to that image. An island slowly emptying of people while the cats carry on, indifferent to the concept of decline. They don’t know about the 2011 tsunami that hit this coast. They don’t know the young generation left for Sendai and Tokyo and didn’t look back. They just exist in the leftover space, which is exactly what cats have always done—they move into whatever room you vacate.

The island has a cat shrine. The story goes that a fisherman accidentally crushed a cat with a stone, and the island’s cats gathered at the spot to mourn, and out of guilt and some older impulse the fisherman built a shrine there. The cats have been considered sacred ever since; dogs are formally banned. There’s something about that particular arrangement—a shrine for the cat you killed, a prohibition against the one animal that might challenge their dominance—that feels like an honest expression of how humans actually relate to animals they’ve wronged. We make them holy when we can’t make them whole.

The cats, for their part, don’t scatter when visitors arrive. They look at you with that specific feline assessment—not hostile, not welcoming, simply measuring—and then go back to whatever they were doing. Which honestly sounds like a reasonable approach to most social situations.