Tachikawa Cat-Return Shrine Guide: History, Ema and Suitengu

Tachikawa’s “Cat-Return Shrine”, where owners pray for lost cats, was named by a jazz pianist — and shares its grounds with a shrine for safe childbirth.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

You may not bring a cat to the Cat-Return Shrine.

The shrine’s official website says so. People of all ages visit the grounds, and some of them are uncomfortable around pets, so visitors are asked not to bring pets in. Not even in your arms.

A sensible reason. And yet a strange one. The creature most closely tied to this shrine is the one creature not allowed in. Then again, most of the people who come here could not bring their cat even if they wanted to. They come precisely because their cat has not come home.

Azusami Tenjin Shrine (阿豆佐味天神社, Azusami Tenjinsha) stands on the Itsukaichi Kaido road in Sunagawacho, Tachikawa (立川), in the western half of Tokyo. Inside its grounds, within the same torii gate, ema — the small wooden prayer plaques you see hanging at every Japanese shrine — pleading for lost cats to come home hang near the maternity sashes of people praying for a baby’s safe arrival. A god of cats and a god of safe childbirth. How did these two come to share one shrine?

And to begin with, why do cats come home here? Carrying that question, I board a bus at the North Exit of Tachikawa Station.

Getting to Tachikawa’s Cat-Return Shrine, and how to make the rounds

The access page on the shrine’s official site is brief. From the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, take a Tachikawa Bus from stop no. 1 bound for Mitsufuji or Hakonegasaki Station, get off at “Sunagawa Yonban”, and you are there. The ride takes about 15 minutes. By car, it is at the “Sunagawa Yonban Koban-mae” traffic lights on the Itsukaichi Kaido, with parking for 32 cars. The Tokyo Shinto Shrine Association’s guide puts it 12 minutes’ walk from Musashi-Sunagawa Station on the Seibu Haijima Line. An article on sippo, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper’s pet website, says it is about a 20-minute walk from Sunagawa-Nanaban Station on the Tama Monorail.

The bus stop names double as the local way of giving an address. In the Edo period (1603–1868), Sunagawa village was divided into wards numbered one to ten, and the names “Sunagawa No. something” survive on bus stops and junctions today. That history is in this series’ article on the Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa. The shrine is in No. 4 — yonban.

Once inside the grounds, what should you do first? The Cat-Return Shrine page of the official site helpfully lists the order of worship, numbered.

1. At the temizuya water basin, purify your hands and your heart.
2. Pray at the main shrine in front of you.
3. Pray at the Kokage Shrine next to it.
4. At the counter, receive an ema plaque and an amulet.
5. Hang your ema. Write your wish on the back.
6. Gently stroke the stone statue of the cat.

Number six is: stroke the cat. And it insists on “gently”. I had never before seen a shrine’s etiquette guide specify how firmly to stroke something.

The thing you stroke is a stone statue in the grounds called the Tadaima Neko — the “I’m Home Cat”. (Tadaima is what every Japanese person says on walking in the front door.) The Cat-Return Shrine page says that the statue is in the grounds and asks you to stroke it gently. One visitor’s blog notes a cute “I’m Home Cat” statue in front of the torii beside the main hall. One cat-lovers’ information site says that stone cats stand here in place of the usual guardian lion-dogs.

A statue of a cat coming home, saying “I’m home”. What the people stroking it are praying for, of course, is that their own cat will turn up at the front door with the same face.

So who gave this shrine the name “Cat-Return”? The shrine itself answers on its official site: Cat-Return Shrine, named by the jazz pianist Yosuke Yamashita.

1987: the jazz pianist’s cat behind the Cat-Return Shrine

In July 2023 the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper ran an article on the shrine and interviewed Yamashita himself about the name. Some thirty-odd years earlier, according to the article, the elder cat of the Yamashita household, Mio-chan, disappeared. For seventeen days they searched the neighbourhood with no luck. Clutching at straws, Yamashita went to pray at Azusami Tenjin Shrine, about two kilometres from his home — and the next morning the cat was at the kitchen door, meowing.

The Asahi’s sippo article reported in 2017 that the shrine had become known thirty years earlier, thanks to a piece Yamashita wrote in 1987 in the art magazine Geijutsu Shincho. He had moved to Tachikawa, his cat went missing, he searched for seventeen days, and when he prayed at a shrine he had stumbled upon, the cat came back. The piece, the article says, was accompanied by a photograph of Azusami Tenjin Shrine. Two newspapers, the same seventeen days.

Afterwards, every time a cat went missing, Yamashita prayed at this shrine, and every time the cat came safely home. As he kept writing in essays and elsewhere that the place was the “Cat-Return Shrine”, it became a talking point among cat lovers — so he told the Yomiuri.

There is a slightly comic twist here. According to sippo, Yamashita had written that only some time later did he learn the shrine had long been called the “Cat-Return Shrine”. But in the 2017 article, the chief priest laughed and told the reporter that nobody had ever called it that — Mr Yamashita named it on his own.

The only one who thought it was an old name was the man who coined it; for the shrine it was news. The godfather did not know he had named the child. Even so, the shrine accepted the name. As owners of missing cats started to visit, the shrine made ema just for cats and cat-shaped amulets, the article says. Today the official site openly displays “Cat-Return Shrine (named by jazz pianist Yosuke Yamashita)”, naming even the namer. A name given without permission now hangs officially, with a credit line. The Japanese idiom for a cramped space is “as narrow as a cat’s forehead”. This shrine’s generosity is considerably wider.

The name spread beyond the shrine. The Tachikawa Tourism and Convention Association’s guide describes the Kokage Shrine as the guardian god of silkworm raising, noting that in recent years it has also been called the “Cat-Return Shrine” and draws the devotion of cat lovers. The city of Tachikawa’s cultural-property page for the site of the Kokage Shrine, a city-designated historic site, also says the Kokage Shrine is called the “Cat-Return Shrine”, and gives as the origin a magazine story about a famous neighbour’s cat coming home.

A nickname that one pianist put in a magazine essay made its way, over thirty-odd years, through the tourism association’s guide and into the cultural-property commentary of the city’s Board of Education. Official documents are usually the very last place to accept a nickname like that. The cat came home even into the paperwork of city hall.

Yamashita, for his part, did not forget his manners. According to the Yomiuri, as thanks he played the gagaku court-music piece “Etenraku” on the piano, recorded it, and dedicated it to the shrine. The piano melody, the article says, still plays quietly in the grounds today. A visitor’s blog also notes that the piano piece playing in the grounds is the “Etenraku” Yamashita offered in thanks for his cat.

A classic of ancient court music, played on the piano by a leading figure of free jazz, piped through a shrine’s grounds. How the gods are listening, I cannot say. But as a thank-you for one cat, it ranks among the more lavish in the world.

Yamashita’s cat stories became a book. According to the publisher Tokuma Shoten, Yamashita, born in 1942, has long had fans for his witty essays too. According to the National Diet Library’s catalogue, Yosuke Yamashita’s Neko-gaeshi Jinja (“The Cat-Return Shrine”) was published by Asuka Shinsha in December 2013 and came out as a Tokuma paperback in June 2017. Chapters in its table of contents include “The First Three Cats: Days in Hayama”, “The Yamashita Family’s Ancestor Cats”, “Outbreak! The ‘Cat-Return Shrine’ Incident”, “The Full Story of Lee-chan’s Escape” and “A Discussion of Cat Shrines Nationwide”. There is even a chapter on ancestor cats. In this household, it seems, the cats have a family tree. According to Tokuma Shoten’s blurb, in English slang jazz musicians are called “cats”. So the person who gave the shrine the name “Cat-Return” is, in English, himself a cat.

Silkworms, mice and cats — and the words written on the ema

Strictly speaking, the Cat-Return Shrine is the Kokage Shrine (蚕影神社), a smaller shrine within the grounds.

The Kokage Shrine is a god of silkworm raising. According to the city of Tachikawa, it was invited here in 1860, at the very end of the Edo period, from Tsukuba district in Hitachi province — today’s Tsukuba City, Ibaraki Prefecture. Because mice eat the silkworm cocoons, the city writes, the shrine used to issue talismans with pictures of cats on them, to keep mice away. This series’ article on the Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa touches on that.

To add a little: the Kokage Shrine was designated a historic site by the city of Tachikawa in 1964. It used to stand alone in the grounds, but in 1980, when the grounds were reorganised, it came to be enshrined beside the worship hall together with other shrines of the grounds, such as the Konpira Shrine and the god of smallpox. So in 1987, when Yamashita’s cat story appeared in the magazine, the Kokage Shrine was already sitting beside the worship hall with the other gods, as it does today.

The Yomiuri article says the area already had a strong affinity for cats. The Tama area — the western part of Tokyo outside the 23 central wards — was once a major silk-raising district, and to silkworms, mice are the great enemy. In the mulberry-field villages, the cat was originally a hard-working guardian. At the end of the Showa era (1926–1989), it changed jobs to messenger of a god who brings strays home. From mouse patrol to missing-cat patrol. Few cats have managed such a neat career change.

Sunagawa was not the only place that valued cats. The same Yomiuri article notes that the local history museum of Hachioji — a city so prosperous from silk that it was called Soto, “the mulberry capital” — holds a lucky charm from the Takatsuki district of the city, a “cat hugging a daruma”. A cat holding a daruma doll. It echoes Sunagawa, where cats are worshipped at a shrine that holds a daruma fair. In the mulberry-field villages of Tama, cats seem to have been creatures with fast-track careers.

So what words hang on the ema rack now?

The Yomiuri reporter copied down some of them. “Please come home as soon as possible, the whole family is waiting.” Among calls and wishes like these hang plaques of joy and gratitude: “You came home — thank you.” “May we live together forever.” On the plaques the sippo reporter saw were the words “Still searching and searching” and “Please come home soon.” The chief priest was surprised at the time, the article says: he had taken down the previous year’s plaques, and there were already this many.

The ema bearing the shrine’s name is decorated with a calico cat, according to a cat-lovers’ information site. The website of a company that publishes festival information reports that this calico design was drawn by one of the shrine’s priests. The cat face that receives wishes from all over Japan is drawn here by the shrine’s own hand.

Visitors stop in front of the ema rack too. One person who came back after a long time to pray for their cat’s health wrote in a blog that among the plaques was a miraculous report of a cat returning after one year and five months. One year and five months. Remarkable patience on one side, remarkable persistence on the other.

Another person’s blog has an epilogue. They asked the cat statue in the grounds for their missing cat to return, and the cat was found safe. The next day, when they went to show the family a photo of the statue, only that photo had vanished from their smartphone. They write that they probably deleted it by mistake, but end by saying it was as though the cat had said, “Found yours — I’m off home now,” and left. The truth is probably the mistake. But I understand the wish to read it the other way.

There is a system for people who live far away. According to the official site, the shrine posts ema to people who cannot visit. Send ¥1,100 to the shrine by registered cash mail and a plaque arrives; write your wish on the back, send it back, and the shrine will hang it on its rack. In the Yomiuri article, a junior priest says requests for ema by post now come from all over Japan, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when travel was difficult. In his hands were letters from Hokkaido and Okayama Prefecture, giving thanks that cats had come home safely. He also mentions someone who got a phone call saying “She’s back!” while in the middle of praying.

So where does the blessing actually come from? Asked that by the reporter, the junior priest replied that it is truly a case of “only the gods know”.

I cannot think of an answer more honest, or more fitting for a shrine.

The Cat-Return Shrine in numbers

• 17 — days Yosuke Yamashita spent searching for his cat. The morning after he prayed at the shrine, the cat was meowing at the kitchen door.
• 1987 — the year the cat story appeared in Geijutsu Shincho. The name “Cat-Return Shrine” was news to the shrine.
• 1,100 — yen, postage included, to request a cat ema by mail. Thank-you letters have come from Hokkaido and from Okayama.
• 6 — steps in the order of worship on the official site. The sixth and last: “gently stroke the stone cat”.
• 0 — pets you may take into the grounds. Not even in your arms. Cats are not allowed in the Cat-Return Shrine.

The wanderer’s quiz

What did Yosuke Yamashita dedicate to the shrine in thanks for his cat’s return?

• A. A stone lantern in the shape of a cat
• B. A recording of “Etenraku” played on the piano
• C. The score of his own jazz suite

The answer comes near the end of this article.

The cat mystery is only half solved. And in these grounds there are people heading to another shrine with a completely different wish. They are carrying maternity sashes. And that shrine once stood somewhere else.