Some women dislike birthdays. I am not one of these. In fact, although my birthday is today, I have been celebrating it the whole month of January. Yesterday I went out for lunch with friends and was greeted by this haiku chalked onto a sign hanging in front of the Naam restaurant (in Vancouver’s east side).

This morning I opened this present (below right) sent from my friend Jean-Pierre in Japan:

In keeping with the lucky cat theme, I thought I’d also share a couple photos and comments sent to me by people responding to my Quest for the Lucky Cat post. From Jodi at floatingclouds.wordpress.com in the U.S., here is a photo of Kiki, “a rescued feral calico cat and my lucky cat…which she promptly knocked off the shelf and broke as soon as I brought it home from SF Chinatown. I had to glue it all back together. How lucky is that?”

The rather spooky looking black cat at the bottom of this post is a giant Maneki-neko Jean-Pierre found in an antique store in Japan.

Craftygreenpoet.blogspot.com author, Juliet, also shared a comment about the lucky cat in her flat in Edinburgh Scotland. Lucky cats around the globe!

Making connections with people is one of the things I love about blogging.

Anyone who has ever eaten at a Chinese food restaurant has probably seen a lucky cat. The statue cat with one raised paw often stands inside the entrance of Chinese restaurants and stores, wlecoming or beckoning people in. I was surprised to discover that the lucky cat originates, not in China, but in Japan. There, it is called Maneki-neko, the beckoning cat.

Before I travelled to Japan last spring, I did some research about the origins of Maneki-neko. I came across a few different stories. One involves a cat who saved a geisha from a snake dropping on  her head. But the one that seems most accepted is about a cat who lived at a poor temple near the city of Edo (the old name for Tokyo) about 200 years ago.

The temple priest had a calico cat, who he was fond of and shared his meagre food with. One day the cat sat at the side of the road near the temple when it began to rain. At the same time, several samurai road up on horse back. They saw the cat raise its paw as if to beckon to them, so they followed the cat to the temple. The priest welcomed them in out of the rain and gave them tea. One of the samurai, Lord Li, was impressed by the priest, and later returned for regular visits. The lord and his family gave money to the temple, and it was never poor again. The story of the faithful cat, who brought luck and prosperity to the poor temple, spread across the land. Soon the first Maneki-neko statue appeared, and eventually the lucky statue spread from Japan to China and to North America.

I thought I might like to write a story for kids involving a statue of Maneki-neko (and perhaps a cat spirit who inhabits the statue), so on my trip to Japan I kept my eyes open for Maneki-neko statues and for real cats. My quest took me from a little antique store in the ancient town of Seki-cho, where the store owner showed me two Maneki-neko figures from the Meiji period (about 1900), to the backstreets of Tokyo, where a tiny shop was filled with lucky cats and real cats lounged up and down a market stairway, to a town beside the ancient shrine of Ise, where a giant stone Maneki-neko stood outside another store filled with lucky cats. (Hello Kitty, or Kitty-chan as she is called in Japan, was also in evidence.)

After all this, the story I ended up starting to write is not about cats (although I may write the Maneki-neko story yet). Instead, it is about (or partly about) two other things I found myself looking out for in Japan: crows and manga. I will tell the you about the crows next.

Here is a page from my Christmas photo album:

(Given last week’s wind storm, I’d rather have a tree fall in the house than on the house!) Merry Christmas!