“猫咪日”看日本人有多爱喵星人

LW: Japan celebrates Cat Day. Nick, maybe you can expand, there, about exactly what is Cat Day and why it is worth celebrating. NL: Cat Day is, well, very much what you’d expect from the name, it is the celebration of cats. LW: Where is this happening? NL: Japan. LW: All right. NL: The date was yesterday, the 22nd February, and there’s a reason for that. Let’s take a quick poll. What noise does a cat make? Lincoln? LW: Meow. NL: Wu You? WY: Meow. NL: I would also say meow. Apparently, in Japan, a cat says “nyan, nyan, nyan”. LW: Japanese cats speak Japanese? NL: Apparently so, yes. And the date of the twenty-second day of the second month, in Japanese, is “ni, ni, ni”, which sounds like “nyan, nyan, nyan”. Some people have been taking photos of their cats, posting them online, selfies with your cat, take a photo of your cat in a costume, in a funny pose, generally do whatever you can with your cat and put it on the internet, seems to be the theme here. Lincoln, you look absolutely disgusted. LW: I don’t like cats. NL: You don’t like cats? WY: Why is that? LW: I know I’m going to get a lot of dislike from some of our listeners, who I assume love cats, but I don’t like cats that much. I find them quite smug. I feel like they’re always trying to be better than you. They always walk into your place, or whatever, and look like you are a visitor in your own house. So for that reason, me and cats have not, historically, gotten along. Wu You, I don’t know about you, what do you think? WY: I prefer dogs. LW: Me too. Dogs are noble creatures, handsome, most of them … WY: Cute … LW: I feel like dogs are always happy to see you regardless of when they see you. NL: They are. The history of Cat Day, as I’m sure you’re really, really interested to know, Lincoln, is that in 1987, an Executive Cat Day Committee … WY: Wow. LW: Unbelievable. NL: … carried out a survey of 9,000 cat lovers across Japan. Who appointed this committee, I’m not sure, but that exists. LW: Can we just stop for a moment and just think about the fact that there’s an Executive Cat Day Committee? Before that, there was an informal Cat Day, people were clamoring for an official Cat Day. NL: But cats are a big thing in Japan in general. Japan is where the concept of the Cat Café took off. Is this something we’re aware of? WY: There is another Cat Café in the Nanluoguxiang area in Beijing. NL: Have you been there? WY: I passed it, I didn’t enter. I just looked at it and thought it was interesting but, yeah. I passed. LW: I saw it, as well. I breezed past it on my way to something else. WY: There is a strong love and demand for cats in Japan. Japan has a very famous brand. Japan is the home of Hello Kitty! NL: It’s not actually a cat. The designers didn’t intend for it to be a cat, when it was made. LW: Well then how have they called it Hello Kitty? NL: I really wasn’t behind that decision. LW: I actually have the article up in front of me, about why Hello Kitty is actually not a cat. Do you want to know? NL: I’m on the edge of my seat. LW: The creator, Sanrio, said that it’s actually not a cat. It’s a little girl. She’s British. She’s a Scorpio. She loves apple pie. She has a twin sister. NL: What are you talking about? LW: And she’s a forty-year-old third grader. Her name is Kitty White. That’s a thing that’s happened; I don’t know why it’s happened, but that seems to be the case. I think Japan is not the only culture that has this kind of affinity for felines. It’s also in Egyptian culture, I think in Egyptian culture they worshipped cats, and you’ll see a lot of old statues and things like that. Cats were also very highly regarded in that culture, as well. NL: I think that was something to do with the afterlife. The cats went with the emperor, the pharaoh, into the afterlife? LW: It seems to be that it’s not too strange; it’s not unheard of, for people to have this kind of love for cats, as it were.