狂ったブログ

There were a lot of things in Tokyo that I was unaccustomed to, but the omnipresence of cats and the number of people that would fall asleep in public were the two that caught my eye the most when I was out taking photographs. My DSLR was still fairly new to me at the time, and I had recently signed up for Flickr and was fairly active on it.

At some point someone invited my to add my photo to his group, and so I discovered Flickr groups. Given that I had noticed that a certain number of my photos were of cats or of people napping in the street, I decided to create two groups of my own to organize those photos in a way that was a bit more cohesive than just tagging them. Once I had stopped generally taking photos of cats in Tokyo, I pretty much forgot about the groups.

Just now, however, I happened to log into my Flickr account (something I seldom do these days), and I noticed that my group for photos of cats in Tokyo had reached 52 members. There are some very nice photos there (not as many are street cats as I would like), and I’m glad to have started something. Sadly, no one has joined my group for photos of people napping in Tokyo.

http://flickr.com/groups/tokyo-neko/
http://flickr.com/groups/tokyo-nap/

I saw the film The Cat Returns before going to Tokyo, and at the time the director’s imagination seemed quite remarkable. The vision of an entire underground cat society (complete with a cat king and his Secret Service cats) seemed so fantastic. Yet when I started walking around Tokyo, that same vision seemed so obvious. In Tokyo there are so many cats about in the streets—some undoubtedly feral, but most collared, outdoor cats—and they generally mind their own business. You might find one walking one way down a street while paying no heed to the human walking the other way. Or simply sitting on a parked motorcycle, or on a public bench. They also congregated in groups, and if you walked around a corner at night in Setagaya, it would be no unusual thing to see a group of four or five cats hanging about as though in a meeting, only to watch you suspiciously and without moving until you were out of sight.

Most of the cats seemed to keep within a fairly limited range, and through routine one could get to know them a little bit. There was the cat that would wait outside the Korean restaurant around the corner from my office, and when someone would go in or out of the restaurant, the cat would trot through the door and into the kitchen until eventually shooed out by the owner. Even when the restaurant was closed and shuttered, he would wait. Then there was the little gang that would hang out by one of the dog-leg turns in Shinsen on the way to Shimokitazawa. Mostly they minded their own business, but one night they accosted a passing lady with mews. It was strange—they paid no attention to us, and there was nothing about her that could easily explain the cats’ attraction to her. From a distance, anyhow, she did not smell strongly of fish or anything. She was as bewildered as we were.

I took my camera with me everywhere in Tokyo, and during my nine months back in San Francisco, I took it out less and less. Now, in New York, I’ve probably taken it out with me twice. I need to get back into the habit of taking my camera with me, and perhaps having an interesting theme or two will help with that. Having photographs of my time in Tokyo is really nice, and I’d like to imagine that I’ll have nice photographs of New York to look back to as well someday.

Sadly, I am now the administrator of a Flickr group for which I can no longer be a participant.