He was relaxing indoors, sharing some tea with the abbot, when rain began to pour. So, he decided to follow it inside to take a rest. He saw the abbot’s pet cat, Tama beckoning to him from inside the temple gates. One day the samurai lord li Naotaka was passing by after a day spent hunting with his falcons. In the early 1600’s the Kotokuin temple was rundown and running out of money. The Story of Gotokuji’s Maneki-neko Gotokuji’s Pagoda And in Gotokuji people buy these lucky cat figurines, make a wish or prayer on them, then leave them at the temple, which creates the immense cat statue collection you see today. You can see maneki neko statues at the entrance of many businesses around tokyo. The maneki-neko is so supernaturally lucky that even statues its likeness bring good fortune and financial prosperity (supposedly). This leads us to our third bakeneko subtype, the maneki-neko. Not all bakeneko are either cruel or indifferent towards humans though. So now, instead of a cart, we have a corpse stealing cat. At some point though, this legend got mixed up with that of the bakeneko, perhaps because some cats, espescially wild ones, tend to scavenge and eat corpses. The name kasha means burning chariot, because in original buddhist texts it was a flaming chariot that would ferry sinners bodies to hell.
Although sometimes they just keep the bodies to eat themselves, or to reanmate as corpse puppets. Wreathed in fire, these cats steal sinner’s corpses from graveyards and brings them to hell. The most gruesome type of bakeneko is the kasha. This transformed cat basically the precursor to the popular catgirl trope from anime today. When a bakeneko transforms into a woman, she is called a neko-musume, or daughter of a cat. Neko-Musume: The Cat-Girlīakeneko also have three sub-types. Bakeneko also have the ability to create reanimated zombie puppets… yikes! 2. Some bakeneko are dangerous, once they gain their powers, they kill and eat their masters, they then take on their masters appearance, replacing their master entirely. But there are definitely also more morbid tales. These bakeneko sound more mischievous than wicked. There are many stories of bakeneko which like to transform into humans, wear towels on their heads and dance the night away.
This makes sense because the term bake-neko actually means changed cat, with the character of bake from obake, meaning those yokai which can shapeshift or transform. Fire also appears on the tips of their tails, which, as you can imagine, leads to them unintentionally lighting houses on fire.īakeneko are cat yokai known for their shape changing abilities, being able to take the appearance of ordinary cats, and also humans. Once they have gained their supernatural powers, the bakenko grow in size, up to the size of a human adult, they begin to walk on their hind legs, they may learn human language, and they can summon fireballs. For this reason in ancient japan, cats’ tails were usually cut short, and it is theorized, that a preference for short-tailed cats led to an unintentional breeding, which resulted in many of japan’s cats now having naturally short tails. They can gain these abilities as a result of age, after living for around 12 or 13 years, from being unusually large, from eating too much lamp oil, or by having too long a tail. Bakeneko: The Shapeshifting Cat Yokaiīakeneko start off as normal cats, but later develop supernatural abilities. Household cats were probably actually eating the lamp oil, since it was made of fish oils… and as we all know, cats are great at stealing food they’re not supposed to eat. The Stones of Five Colors and the Empress Jokwa, an Old Chinese StoryĬats in Japan were associated with the supernatural because of their ability to appear and disappear silently like shadows, their nocturnal nature, their strange ability to be both affectionate and yet wild, and for the fact that lamp oil would disappear whenever they were around.The Story of the Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Flower.The Story Of Urashima Taro, The Fisher Lad.The Story Of Princess Hase, A Story Of Old Japan.The Shinansha, or The South Pointing Carriage.Momotaro, or the Story of the Son of a Peach.The Story of The Man Who Did Not Wish to Die.The Adventures of Kintaro, The Golden Boy.The Happy Hunter and the Skillful Fisher.The Mirror of Matsuyama, a Story of Old Japan.Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki.Shikigami: the Servant Spirits of Onmyoji.Gashadokuro: The Giant Skeleton That Wants to Eat You.Hyakki Yagyo: The Night Parade of One Hundred Yokai.