Japan’s lucky cats may be cute but they won’t save the economy

Can cute cats rescue Japan’s economy? It is a measure of the desperate times that a leading Japanese popular magazine is floating a new economic theory that, it says, may rescue Japan from gloom and doom. It is called nekonomics, derived from neko, the word for cat.

It’s crazy but Japan’s conventional economic indicators are poor and leading news media are writing obituaries for Abenomics, named after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, that promised to make Japan a great economic power again. Abe is nowhere to be seen near economic policies. He is still in power, but too busy peddling ideas of Japan as a “normal” nation with a new constitution allowing it to have a proper military, ideas that will be economically costly and may have dangerous political and military consequences.

READ MORE: Japan’s Abenomics programme lies in tatters

No wonder Japanese are searching for their salvation and, as is often, said, “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” – or cat in this case. The heroine of the claim of Spa! weekly magazine is Tama, now sadly dead – worn out, some people claimed, by her labours to boost the tourism industry of the tiny town of Kinokawa.

Tama, a calico stray, used to hang around the local railway station, which was earmarked for closure until someone had the bright idea of making Tama the stationmaster, replete with cap and badge of authority. The obscure station did a roaring business from tourists who flooded in to see the cat. The town prospered by more than a billion yen (HK$68.9 million) until Tama died last year. More than 3,000 mourners attended her funeral.

Now another cat is making headlines. She is white but with bold black eyebrows, and all she has to do is arch her eyebrows, which form the Chinese characters for the number eight, considered lucky in Japan (as in China). She is called Hachi or “Eight” and is an employee in a small tobacconist’s shop in Mito, north of Tokyo.

Already, Japanese tourists are flocking to see Hachi. The shop owner told Mainichi newspaper that a lot of them had good things happen after seeing Hachi’s face.

Japan has a fixation with cats. Think Hello Kitty and Doraemon and the maneki neko cats with paws up that sit in shop and restaurant windows. There’s also Tashiro Island, where cats outnumber humans. Japan’s cat population is almost 10 million, set to surpass the 11.5 million dogs.

Spa! calculates that the cat business, counting cat food, TV commercials, smartphone games and the boom in cat tourism may add 2.3 trillion yen to the economy.