There are many ways to spend a holiday in Japan. You can pursue temples, noodles, lacquerware, cherry blossoms, whisky, vintage denim, highly specialised stationery, or the sort of strawberries that look as if they were raised by perfectionists in a laboratory. Or you can make a beeline for one of the country’s most successful and emotionally competent public servants: a cat in a hat.
This is not slang or one of those travel-writer flourishes that collapses on contact with reality. Japan really does have stationmaster cats, and they are exactly what they sound like—feline officials attached to railway stations, photographed with great enthusiasm, treated with formal respect, and credited with doing a better job of local revitalisation than a battalion of consultants.
