Last Updated on April 29, 2026 by admin
If you own a Japanese Bobtail, you already know this one: every time you post a photo of your cat sitting up with one paw raised, someone in the comments asks if she’s posing on purpose. She is. She isn’t. The breed has been doing the seated, one-paw-up thing for a thousand years before anyone made a statue of it.
That statue — the waving cat in the front window of every sushi restaurant, every dry cleaner, every Chinatown gift shop — is modeled on a real, specific cat. Not a generic cartoon. A calico Japanese Bobtail with a pom-pom tail, a 1,400-year-old job in Japan, and a temple built in her honor.
The pom-pom tail isn’t a docking. It’s the breed.
A Japanese Bobtail’s tail is one to two inches long, curled like a chrysanthemum bud, and unique to every cat — no two tails are identical. The shape comes from a missense mutation in the HES7 gene, identified in a 2016 genetic study, which causes the vertebrae at the end of the tail to shorten and partially fuse.
Unlike Manx cats — where a similar mutation is linked to spinal problems — the Japanese Bobtail tail mutation is benign. It doesn’t affect mobility. It doesn’t affect health. It just makes the tail short and decorative, the way a rabbit’s is.
The mutation is also dominant, not recessive. If one parent is a bobtail, every kitten in the litter gets the pom-pom too.
The job they were imported to do
Bobtailed cats arrived in Japan from China or Korea sometime around the 6th century, brought by Buddhist monks who needed something to keep rats out of the rice paper scrolls in their temples. They worked. They stayed.
For the next thousand years they were temple cats and palace cats. They were so valuable that by the late 1500s, owning one was a status symbol restricted by law to the Japanese nobility. The peasants who grew the rice that fed the temples weren’t allowed to keep them.
Then in 1602, the silkworm industry started losing the war to rats. The Imperial court decreed every cat in Japan must be set free — buying or selling them was outlawed. Overnight the imperial bobtail became the alley cat, the farm cat, the boat cat, the everywhere cat. They’ve been the working cat of Japan ever since.
The temple where the statue was born
The maneki-neko (literally “beckoning cat”) legend belongs to Gōtoku-ji, a small temple in the Setagaya district of Tokyo. The story goes that during the Kan’ei era — sometime between 1622 and 1624 — a samurai lord named Ii Naotaka was riding past the temple in a thunderstorm when a cat sitting at the gate raised its paw to him.
He stopped. He went inside the temple. The tree he had been standing under was struck by lightning a moment later.
Naotaka, who happened to be one of the wealthiest daimyo in Japan, made the temple his family shrine. He rebuilt it in 1633. The cat got a small shrine of its own. Today, Gōtoku-ji is still standing, and you can buy a maneki-neko statue from the gift shop. There are thousands of them stacked in the courtyard, left by visitors over the centuries.
What it’s actually like to live with one
Japanese Bobtails are loud. Not yowly — chatty. They have one of the largest vocal ranges of any cat breed, and they use all of it. They will hold conversations. They will answer direct questions. They will tell you, in extreme detail, when the food bowl is half-empty.
They are one of the few cat breeds routinely described as “dog-like” without exaggeration. They fetch. Many walk on leashes. They greet visitors at the door. They are obsessed with water — not swimming exactly, but slapping water bowls until the floor floods.
And they are, almost always, calico. The mi-ke (“three-fur”) coloration of white, orange, and black is the traditional pattern, and it’s the one represented in nearly every authentic maneki-neko statue. Calico is overwhelmingly female because the orange gene is X-linked, which is why the lucky cat is almost always read as “she.”
The misconception worth clearing up
The maneki-neko statue isn’t waving goodbye. The gesture is the Japanese beckoning motion — palm out, fingers down, pulling air toward you. To Western eyes it reads as a wave. To Japanese eyes it reads as come here.
A raised left paw invites customers. A raised right paw invites money. A statue with both paws raised is considered overconfident, and bad luck.
The Cat Fanciers’ Association recognized the Japanese Bobtail as a championship breed in 1976, almost three centuries after the first statue was carved. The breed had been famous for so long that becoming “official” was an afterthought.
If you own one, you already know what the statue means. She isn’t waving. She’s calling you over. She wants you to come closer. She has something to tell you.
What’s your cat’s name? Drop it below. 🐱