2006. Kishi Station, rural Wakayama. The line is losing money. The station is unstaffed. Closure is a live conversation in local government.
A calico cat called Tama has been living by the ticket gate, fed by the shopkeeper next door, doing what cats do, which is nothing, professionally.
In January 2007 the railway makes her station master. This is not a metaphor. She is given a title, a small hat, an office by the gate, and a salary paid in cat food.
Passenger numbers rose immediately. Then the story went national, then international, and the line — which had been weeks of paperwork away from disappearing — was saved by a cat who had no idea any of this was happening.
It escalated the way things escalate here. Tama was promoted to "super station master", then to "managing executive officer", making her, on paper, a member of company management. The railway ran cat-themed trains designed by a famous industrial designer. The station itself was rebuilt in the shape of a cat's face.
When she died in 2015, around 3,000 people attended the funeral. She was formally elevated to a Shinto deity and enshrined at the station. Her successor, Nitama, took the post after what the company described, with a straight face, as a period of training.
The economic impact was estimated by a regional research institute at over 1.1 billion yen. A cat, sitting still, on a platform.
The funny part is the hat. The astonishing part is that nobody in this story was joking. Not the railway, not the local government, not the 3,000 mourners, not the priest. Japan looked at an unemployed cat and applied the full apparatus of a serious institution — title, uniform, succession plan, promotion, funeral, deification — because if a thing is going to be done here, it will be done completely. That is the same instinct that produces the trains, the ramen and the apologies. You are watching the mechanism run on a cat.
- Tama's official title at death was "Honourable Eternal Station Master". It is on the shrine.
- The line still runs the cat train, the toy train and the strawberry train, all designed by Eiji Mitooka, who also designs luxury sleeper trains.
- Nitama still works there. Her office hours are posted, and she keeps roughly none of them.