A Cat and a Rice Paddle are Dancing

In this painting, a rice paddle (spatula) dressed in a woman’s kimono dances with a cat. It’s a visual pun based on the old folk saying “A cat and a rice paddle,” meaning “Every Tom, Dick and Harry.” The poem written in the background reads: “Dad, Mom, the cat and the rice paddle are all dancing.” In haiku, “dance” is a seasonal word to indicate summer, when families gather in their ancestral homes for the August bon dance, still performed today all over Japan. Like the cat, people still wear towels on (or tied around) their heads while dancing to help bear the terrible August heat.  

Rice paddle woman and cat 

「ちいもはゝも画賛図 」

Umi-Mori Art Museum

This eighteenth century collaboration between master painter Maruyama Ōkyo and the famous haiku poet Yosa Buson shows the humor and life force that animate many Japanese artworks. In a country where religious and artistic practices saw little separation between humans and nature since ancient times, anthropomorphized objects and animals are supernatural but also familiar. Sometimes they’re scary—a popular legend of the time told of a cat that turned into a monster and danced around with a towel on its head—but Ōkyo’s cat is having too much fun to bedevil anyone. 

This tradition led to the Japanese worldview that can accept human-like animals and objects as partners in play without worrying if a hidden evil lurks inside. This may explain one of the biggest differences I’ve found between the modern cute and kawaii aesthetics: when it appears in art, the cute is viewed with a degree of ambivalence—or even suspicion—that Japanese people don’t feel about kawaii.