Tashirojima, Cat Island

May 11, 2017

So with only a few more off days, Caoliang and I decided to spend this day adventuring out to Tashirojima, or better known as one of the cat islands in Miyagi prefecture. I'm not a huge cat person but figured it's a little special to Japan to have animal specific islands so why not give it a try.

We got some advice from some of his coworkers who had been to the island before as to how to get there. They recommended us to start the day early as it takes an hour train ride followed by a 40 minute ferry ride to reach the island. And on top of the long commute, the ferry times are not very frequent. Actually there were only three ferry times to get to Tashirojima!! So with that in mind, we started our day very early waking up at 6am.

So once we made it through the long train ride and ferry ride, we finally made it to the island. We also saw some other tourists who made the journey on the ferry ride with us. When we got to the island, I noticed there weren't many people there and there was a lot of greenery.

With the help of Google Maps, we headed to see the cat shrine first. The walk there was probably about twenty minutes with a slight uphill. When we got to the shrine it was a little disappointing. You would think that it being a cat island the shrine would be decent right? Wrong. It was tiny! But at least the shrine actually had two cats hanging out in front of it along with many charms visitors probably brought and left.

There wasn't much else to see on the island. We walked about half of it in a few hours and the most interesting thing was probably Manga Island. It's actually not an island but a collection of cat looking houses. I read online that during certain parts of the year you can actually rent them out to stay in. They were really cute. They were situated on top of a hill that had a pretty nice view. We spent a bit of time here taking photos while cats climbed on top of the picnic table, probably looking for some loving.

A fun fact about this island is that in Japan's late Edo Period, the island raised silk worms for their textiles and kept cats to keep mice away from their precious silk worms. Over time, since the cats were never fixed, their population naturally increased while the human population decreased. Now the cats actually out number the humans 6 to 1. While we were there we probably only saw about twenty cats. Some of them looked sick or hungry so it was a little saddening. I'm not sure where the rest of them were hiding.

Anyways, the weather was a bit drizzly and by the 2pm ferry we were about done with Tashirojima. Cute place and nice experience but I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they just really loved cats and wanted to feed a bunch of strays. Oh yeah, you could also bring cat food if you wanted to feed the cats too.

Well as always, it was nice to explore some place new and get out of the city a bit. Counting down the days now! We've got about a week and half till leaving Sendai and soon Japan too. I'm looking forward to having holidays together with Caoliang but before that, a visit from my Tokyo friend, Susan this coming weekend. Yay! Stay tuned!


xx
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