Quirky Japan Chronicles – Episode 24: Japan’s Cat Islands — When Cats Outnumber People
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
Japan has, at latest count, approximately eleven islands where cats substantially outnumber the human residents.
Not slightly outnumber. Substantially. On Aoshima — the most famous of Japan’s neko-jima (cat islands), a small island off the coast of Ehime Prefecture in the Shikoku region — the ratio at the time of most recent documented estimates was approximately six cats per human resident. The island has approximately fifteen human residents. The cats number in the dozens, possibly approaching one hundred.
These are not feral cats in the sense that urban feral cats are feral — thin, sick, surviving at the edges of human food systems. They are, by almost all accounts, healthy, well-fed, sociable, and somewhat demanding of the attention of visitors. They are cats who live on an island and who know that visitors arriving by boat tend to bring cat food.
This is a situation that has attracted considerable international media attention over the past decade — the cat island phenomenon has been covered by virtually every major international English-language news outlet — and that has become a significant domestic tourism draw within Japan. Day trips to Aoshima, organised from the nearest ferry port, have become popular enough that the island’s actual residents have expressed mixed feelings about the volume of attention.
But the cat island phenomenon is more interesting than the simple look at all the cats story that most international media coverage provides. It is, examined more carefully, a story about Japan’s demographic decline, about the specific culture of the rural fishing community, and about the complicated relationship between cats and Japanese culture that goes back centuries.
How the Islands Got Their Cats
The origin of the cat populations on Japan’s cat islands is consistent across most of them: the cats were brought to the islands originally to control rodents — specifically mice and rats that were threatening fishing equipment, stored food, and the boats themselves.
This is a practical history, not a romantic one. The cats on Aoshima, on Tashirojima (the other most famous cat island, off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture), and on the other neko-jima were working animals in the original sense — they were there to kill rodents, and they were valued for that function.
What happened subsequently is a combination of changing economic conditions and the specific demographic pattern of Japan’s rural islands. As the fishing industries on many small islands declined — as younger generations left for mainland cities, as the specific type of fishing that had sustained the communities became less viable — the human population of the islands fell. The cats did not.
The cats — whose population had been sustained by human food waste and deliberate feeding alongside their rodent-hunting work — continued to thrive as the human population shrank around them. The ratio inverted. What had been a working population of useful animals became a population that substantially outnumbered the people who had originally kept them.
The Specific Islands: Aoshima and Tashirojima
Aoshima (Ehime Prefecture) is the most internationally famous of Japan’s cat islands, primarily because the aerial photograph of the island — showing cats lined up along the pier as a boat arrives — went globally viral in the mid-2010s and produced an international cat island tourism phenomenon.
The island is small — approximately 1.6 square kilometres — and accessible only by ferry from the town of Nagahama on the Ehime coast. The ferry schedule is limited, which constrains visitor numbers. The cats are indeed present in substantial numbers, they are indeed sociable and not fearful of humans, and they do indeed converge on new arrivals with the specific confident expectation of food that cat logic produces.
The actual experience of visiting Aoshima is somewhat different from the viral photograph’s implication of a paradise of cats. The island is a small, slightly rundown fishing community whose actual residents are elderly, whose infrastructure reflects the decline of the fishing economy, and whose cat population — while genuinely charming — exists in a context that is also a context of demographic difficulty and economic struggle. The most honest accounts of visiting Aoshima include both the genuine pleasure of many cats and the somewhat melancholy reality of the community that surrounds them.
Tashirojima (Miyagi Prefecture) is accessible by ferry from Ishinomaki and has a somewhat larger human population than Aoshima — approximately seventy residents as of recent estimates — and a cat population that is substantial but not as dramatically imbalanced as on Aoshima. Tashirojima has an additional distinction: a cat shrine (neko-jinja), a small Shinto shrine dedicated to a cat deity, that exists because of a specific local legend involving a cat that was accidentally killed during the island’s silk production period and whose spirit was subsequently enshrined to bring good fortune.
The Tashirojima visitor experience is somewhat more developed than Aoshima’s — there are basic accommodation options and food service, and the island has been more deliberately positioned for tourism. The cats are present in numbers that require careful negotiation when walking the narrow paths between buildings.
The Japanese Relationship with Cats: A Brief History
The cat island phenomenon makes more sense in the context of Japan’s long and specific relationship with cats.
Cats arrived in Japan from China — brought, probably, as ship’s cats for rodent control, arriving approximately in the Nara period (8th century CE). The Buddhist monasteries, which were the primary repositories of texts and grain and therefore the primary targets of rodent damage, were early cat-keepers. The cat’s specific status was elevated in the Heian period aristocratic culture, where the court cat became a symbol of status and where the earliest documented Japanese cat name appears in the diary of Sei Shōnagon (author of The Pillow Book).
The maneki-neko (beckoning cat) — the ceramic or plastic cat with one raised paw that is the near-universal good-luck talisman of Japanese shops and restaurants — is the most visible expression of the Japanese belief in the cat’s connection to good fortune. The maneki-neko is Shinto-adjacent in its function: a protective charm that invites business and good luck into the space where it is displayed. Its ubiquity in Japanese commercial spaces demonstrates how thoroughly the cat is embedded in the Japanese symbolic vocabulary of prosperity and protection.
The specific contemporary Japanese cat obsession — the cat café (which I have written about in Episode 1 of this series), the specific internet culture of Japanese cat content, the outsized Japanese contribution to global cat meme culture — has roots in this long history of positive human-cat association.
The Demographic Story: What the Cat Islands Mean
I want to step back from the cats for a moment and look at what the cat island phenomenon actually represents at the demographic level — because this is the story that most international coverage of cat islands misses.
The cat islands are the most visually extreme version of a phenomenon that is occurring across rural Japan: the inversion of the historical relationship between human communities and the natural and animal world around them, as those human communities decline.
The specific ratio — more cats than people on Aoshima — is newsworthy because it is extreme and because cats are specifically appealing. But the same underlying demographic dynamic is producing empty schools in mountain villages, closed shops in regional town centres, abandoned farmhouses throughout rural Japan, and the slow withdrawal of the human presence from areas that sustained significant populations for centuries.
The cat island is the cute version of this story. The abandoned school is the more difficult version. They are the same story, at different points on the spectrum of demographic change.
This does not make the cats less charming. It does mean that visiting an island of cats is also, if you choose to see it, visiting a community that is at the extreme end of a demographic process that is quietly transforming rural Japan.
Visiting Japan’s Cat Islands: Practical Information
For visitors who want to visit one of Japan’s cat islands, the practical information.
Aoshima (Ehime): the ferry departs from Nagahama Port in Ehime Prefecture. The ferry schedule is limited — typically two to three departures per day in each direction — and the crossing takes approximately thirty minutes. Day trips are the standard format; there is no tourist accommodation on the island and limited facilities. Bringing cat food is welcomed but check the current guidelines — there have been periods where specific types of food have been requested or discouraged by the residents.
Tashirojima (Miyagi): the ferry departs from Ishinomaki Port. More developed tourist infrastructure than Aoshima, with basic accommodation available for overnight stays. The cat shrine is a specific destination within the island.
General notes: the islands are small working communities, not tourist attractions. The human residents deserve the same courtesy that any residents of any small community deserve — their privacy, their right to go about their daily lives without being photographed as a backdrop, and their tolerance of visitors whose presence they may find more ambivalent than the cats do.
The cats will not share these reservations. They know what you are there for. They will assess whether you have brought food and adjust their behaviour accordingly.
This is honest. The cats are nothing if not honest.
Yoshi’s Honest Assessment
I have not been to Aoshima or Tashirojima. This is one of the gaps in my experience of my own country that I should probably address.
What I have done is look at a great many photographs and read a great many accounts, and what I think is this: the cat island is genuinely wonderful if you encounter it with honest expectations (moderate-to-many cats, a small and somewhat rundown rural community, limited facilities) rather than inflated ones (a paradise of infinite cats in a beautiful fishing village offering excellent food and transport). The photographs that went viral selected for the best version of the reality. The reality is somewhat more nuanced.
The nuanced reality is also quite good. Many cats. A quiet, slow-paced island. A ferry ride. The specific atmosphere of a small community at the edge of Japan’s demographic story.
And the cats are, by all accounts, genuinely excellent cats.
This is, in the end, the most important assessment.
— Yoshi 🐈 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Quirky Japan Chronicles – Episode 1: Cat Cafés” and “Why Japan Has So Many Abandoned Buildings” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
