まるです。 I am Maru

まるです。

I fed “What’s the appeal of cats? / Japanese” into the Google Translate online language translation resource and out came 猫の魅力は何ですか？OK, it felt good for a few seconds, but I'm not any closer to understanding why videos like this one are so popular in Japan.

Look, I like cats as much as the next guy. And even though my doctor assures me that I am as allergic to them as I am to dust mites and dogs, I won't hold that against them. I may not be motivated to cohabitate with a member of their tribe, but I do think they are beautiful, elegant, amusing, and fascinating.  And I appreciate their determination, too, to rid the planet of small rodents and song birds who stray into their space.

More importantly, I really don't see why so many people have found this video to be so watchable.  Never the less, when I see the kind of numbers this one has earned  I am impressed, very impressed. As of this writing “I am Maru” has garnered 21,754,744 views and the producer and poster of this masterpiece of feline Cinema Verite (someone by the name of mugumogu) has scored 518,341subscribers, which in the realm of YouTube is something akin to an Academy Award Guinness Book record. I personally doubt that footage of a nude Lady Gaga rolling around on the floor pretending to be a cat might have a hard time topping these stats. Well, that's obviously and inaccurate exaggeration, but you get my point; an awful lot of folks have invested their time in watching this video of the not too spectacular shenanigans of very attractive and charming, although not extraordinary house cat named Maru. 

In this video, first he plays with a stray button or a piece of candy that he finds on the floor and then he has a high old time pulling on some yarn. I get it, we are watching a C A T. And then, as if to provide some footage to allow the audience to rest and recover after all that excitement, mugumogu puts some white titling across the screen informing us that Maru, in the sequence that is about to follow,  is "a lazy bone, basically." And then we see Maru laying on his back and yawning. And then mugumogu informs us that Maru is a "mischievous boy" and we see him rummaging through a cat food storage canister on his own personal search and destroy mission. Next,  it's on to a cat nap in the bathroom sink. And we are shown a close up of Maru's face, then his feet, some typical silly cat behavior around the house, the getting of a belly rub, and on and on. Maru gets his little cat face temporarily stuck in a plastic cup and plays with a toy mouse (yawn!).


Hey, it's all very cute, but mugumogu never delivers. We never see Maru put together a winning portfolio of stocks, paint a masterpiece in the style of Botticelli, play the trombone, knit a doily, blow a glass vase or anything else that would prove that Maru really is a special cat, a one in a zillion cat. And then there's more toying with cat toys, more cat silliness, on and on... Ah, but 4 minutes and 21 seconds into this small mammal expose Maru steps it up a bit by taking flying belly slides into open ended cardboard boxes which he surfs across the polished hardwood floor. Granted, it would be more compelling if he pulled a rabbit out of hat or sang a few bars of the aria from Rigoletto, but after 4 minutes plus of playing with yarn and the like, I'll take it! 

I think that watching this video is an opportunity to do some sleuthing about Japanese culture and interests. Kind of like dropping in on another planet to take the measure of their civilization. What is it that they find so compelling here?  Yes, Maru is a most attractive little cat, clean too, I'm sure, but all we see in this video is this little guy doing typical cat things. This would never fly here in America. True, we have our own cat videos, dog videos too, but they only pull the sorts of numbers you'd expect from another pet owner's video about his own pet...

But I'm laughing at myself now because to back up the claim above, I went to the YouTube search engine and typed in "cat videos", and boy did I get a shock. I came across some others that I took to be American and that also have extraordinary numbers and I thought "Snagged!  Caught in the act of being a pompous know it all, again" but then I looked closer, and these high number cat videos are also Japanese. Don't believe me? Take a look at "Funny Cats - A Funny Cat Videos Compilation 2015" which shows today that it has scored 3,094,259 views and was posted by mihaifrancu. Or check out “Funny Cats Compilation [Most See] Funny Cat Videos Ever Part 1” which I think gives us a real clue to what the appeal of cat videos is to the Japanese, as the name of the producer and poster of this one is Forget Your Sadness.  And there must be a lot of sad Japanese who want to forget that emotion because this one has pulled a whopping  82,907,574 views as of today!

There are many, many other funny, happy cat videos to be found and enjoyed on YouTube! However, I remain unmoved. I am not now, nor will I ever be a hardcore fan of videos in the Funny Cats genre. I just don't get it. I'm far too set in my ways.

And just when I thought my cat fancier friends in Japan couldn't puzzle me any further, I came across a video titled "Tokyo's unusual 'cat petting cafes", actually a YouTube posted video of what originally (I guess) was a bit of broadcast news about life in Japan. It seems that the Japanese have a major dose of that basic human need: admiring, appreciating, and petting a little pussy cat. But this is a need that they have a hard time satisfying because they simply are too busy working themselves to death to own cats and they've been busy making their apartment buildings practical to the point of resident madness, by banning cats inside, anyway But the Japanese are clever and practical in other ways. There are now cafes in Tokyo and other cities, like Osaka, where for $4 for a drink and $12 for an hour of cat rental, you can sit and relax and enjoy the company of a feline. Actually, this sounds great to me. Certainly, far better than watching cat porn on YouTube at home. Who wants to snuggle up to an iPad with a cat video running on it? Instead you can hire the services of a feline prostitute who will swat its little claws at the string you dangle in front of its face as intimately as your own cat and who knows, may even indulge all of those secret cat fantasies you have deep down and do things your own cat would never even consider. 

But wait, the forces of darkness never rest. Tokyo's city leaders apparently have just passed a law that there will be no public access to cats for non cat owners outside of the hours of 8am to 8pm. So what next, after hours private human-cat love clubs?  

Tokyo's unusual 'cat petting cafes'