Maneki-neko

You have seen this one. It's in the window of every restaurant, every shop, every takeaway counter — the white cat with one paw up, waving you in.

What's less well known is that there are three completely different origin stories for it, they don't agree, and each one is a small theology in its own right.

One: the temple and the thunderstorm

Ii Naotaka, lord of Hikone, is out hawking. Passing a small poor temple, he notices a cat at the gate — and the cat is beckoning him.

He follows it inside.

And while he's under the roof, a sudden thunderstorm breaks over the spot where he had been standing.

The cat saved a great man by diverting him out of the path of harm. The temple — Gōtokuji, in Setagaya — became the Ii family's temple, and it keeps the cult to this day. If you go now, there is a hillside covered in thousands of white cat figures, left by people whose luck came through.

Two: the woman who was too poor to keep her cat

An old woman in Asakusa can't afford to feed her cat, and gives it up.

The cat comes to her in a dream and says: make my form into a doll, and you will receive blessings.

So she does. She makes cat figures out of Imado ware — the local pottery — and sells them near Asakusa Shrine. They sell. She's lifted out of poverty by them.

I find this the strangest of the three, and the best. Every other object in this tradition that comes to life does it to haunt someone. This cat comes back from the dead to tell its owner how to monetize it. It hands her the product idea. The dream isn't a warning, it's a business plan.

Three: the courtesan's cat and the thing under the floor

This one is not cute.

Usugumo is a courtesan in the Yoshiwara, the pleasure quarter. Her cat, Tama, starts behaving badly — following her everywhere, and when she gets up to go to the latrine, biting her robe to hold her back.

A bystander sees a cat attacking a woman and does what people did to strange old cats. He beheads it.

The head flies through the air — and lands on the serpent that was waiting in the latrine pit, and kills it.

The cat had been holding her back from the snake. It could not say so. It got killed for trying, and it finished the job anyway, in mid-air, after death.

Why three stories is the interesting part

Look at who they belong to.

One belongs to a temple and a feudal lord. One belongs to a poor artisan. One belongs to the pleasure quarter.

Temple, tradesman, brothel. That's most of the Edo social ladder, and each rung produced its own version independently.

And all three are doing the same job, which is rehabilitating the cat.

Because elsewhere in this tradition, the cat is the most feared animal in the Japanese house. Let one live long enough and it grows a second tail and starts giving orders. Catch one at the lamp oil and you find it standing upright, dancing, wearing a napkin on its head. The cat is the domestic animal that goes wrong.

The maneki-neko is the same animal's pardon.

Every unnerving thing a cat does — staring at nothing, gesturing with a paw, pawing at your clothes — gets re-read here as protection. The cat isn't watching you. It's watching for you.

And the Usugumo story is the hinge, because it contains the fear and refutes it in the same breath. The man beheads the cat because that is what you do to a cat acting strangely — that's the old reflex, fully intact. And the story's entire point is that he was wrong, and the proof is a dead snake.

The paw code

There's a convention worth knowing.

Right paw up beckons customers. Left paw up beckons money. Some have both up, which is considered a bit greedy.

And there's a detail at Gōtokuji I think about more than I should.

Gōtokuji's cats raise the right paw, and they hold no coin — and the temple is explicit about why. Its cat offers you the opportunity, not the payout.

Which is the whole legend in one design decision. The lord under the temple roof didn't get rich. He got out of the rain.