2016-03-30 01:23 Mittan
Y (Kuma's owner)
Today, I will write about Mittan, our female ginger cat.
Mittan was a stray cat. She is a small cat and has a bent short tail and short legs. Her coat is a bit longer than ordinary cats. Her coat on her tummy almost reaches the floor and it makes her legs look shorter than they are.
When she is running, she looks like a cartoon character of fast forwarded films. Her short legs make her look funny. I like to watch her running. Someone said that she must be a Munchkin cat, but I don't think she is. Her legs are shorter than normal cats, and longer than Munchkin cats.
People who know about cats well think that Mittan is a male cat, because most ginger cats are male. I don't remember the scientific reason, but it is related to DNA.
Her favorite things are playing with a ball and chasing small insects. Sometimes, I hear the noise of a ball rolling on the floor in the middle of the night. The first time I heard that noise, I was very scared. I thought somebody had sneaked into my house.
For her unfortunately, she is an indoor cat, so she doesn't have much chance to see insects. Actually, I don't want her to catch insects, except mosquitoes and flies. There are lots of mosquitoes around here and I want her to catch them. If she catches mosquitoes, it would be a big help but she doesn't.
"Common, Mittan! Why don't you catch the mosquitoes?"
Cats are cats, they don't care what we say.
She has a special ability for opening sliding doors. When I was at home alone, I heard the noise of the sliding door on the upper floor being opened. It made me really surprised and I thought somebody had come into my house again. I wonder how many times she has scared me.
She has scared me a lot, although she is easily scared. She is very timid, and she doesn't like anyone who she is not familiar with. And of course, she doesn't like the vet or vacuum cleaners.
She had a vaccination last month, so she won't have to see the vet for at least one year. I think she is happy now.
According to Japanese legend or rumour, a cat that has a bent tail brings luck. I usually don't believe in legends but O.K. I will. I'll hope that she will bring luck someday.
2016-03-22 03:52 Moko-Nyan
Y (Kuma's owner)
I'm going to introduce Moko today. He is our oldest cat. He was adopted from a volunteer who rescues abandoned cats. He came to our house in 2005. At the time, he was approximately 3 years old. Actually, nobody knows his real age. He is a big boy and looks like Maine Coon.
When he was young, he was very timid and didn't like anyone he had never met. He always followed one of our cats, Kuma, like a kitten. We used to said that Kuma seemed to have a big bodyguard.
The most terrifying thing for him was a vacuum cleaner. Every time he encountered the vacuum cleaner he ran away or climbed somewhere higher than it.
One day, I was cleaning with the vacuum cleaner and I was getting closer to the cats. There were three cats and two of them didn't care for the vacuum cleaner. Moko was nervous and tried to escape where he was. But he noticed that the other two cats weren't scared. He looked at the two cats and stopped running. Since then, he's been getting used to the vacuum cleaner little by little.
Furthermore, he got used to unfamiliar people. We had visitors sometimes and he met many people, I guess that opportunity made him changed.
He is 13 years old now. He has got some issues with his nose and he is under treatment by the vet. I hope he is able to have a happy life as long as he can.
2016-03-11 03:49 The day my life has changed
Y (Kuma's owner)
Five years ago today, I was in Japan. I was an Adobe Flash creator, mainly making online games, but I didn't have a job on that day and I was relaxing with my four cats without knowing what would happen. My husband was also at home and he was working.
It was before 3 p.m.; the massive earthquake struck us. I was in the living room and quickly held on to the water tank of tropical fish with my hands. The water splashed everywhere, my four cats lost countenance and walked around the living room. My house was shaking unbelievably. I hoped it would stop soon, but it didn't. I felt it lasted so long, and it was really long. It went on for more than 200 seconds. The time of shaking was 7 to 10 times longer than the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the Niigata Chuetsu Earthquake.
I thought that that day might be the last day of my life.
After the shaking stopped, my husband turned on the TV and we were waiting for the latest news coming in. I checked around inside the house' the water tank lost some water but it was OK, and the fish looked scared. The living room floor was wet with sprinkled water from the tank. The books fell onto the floor, and the kitchen shelf doors were all locked automatically. (Japan has many earthquakes and some daily necessities have a special function corresponding to earthquakes. For example, heaters have to have the function that extinguishes the flame when earthquakes occur. This is decided by law.)
I could see the people on TV were all in utter confusion. All the TV stations changed their program to the news. After a while, I realised what happened. The epicentre was offshore of Fukushima Pref. I sent some text to my friends and made sure they were all right. Then I went outside. There were neighbors on the street. They found that there was a gap of about 1 to 2 cm between the boundary of the public street and our sites which were flat before the earthquake. Unbelievably, the massive energy made the ground rise up. We lived roughly about 400 km from the epicentre. If we lived near the epicentre how much damage would we get?
I went back to the living room to hear about the damage on the TV. I don't remember when I heard the news about the Fukushima nuclear reactors. I just remember that I thought the awful thing had started. We had a guideline book for nuclear accidents and we knew what to do. We stopped the ventilator and closed all the windows. Sometimes, we talked with our neighbor about the direction of the wind because we thought that winds might contain radio activity.
As time passed, people knew the details of damages including the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. That news of the nuclear reactor left us uneasy, very uneasy. That was not only the news that made us feel uneasy, we saw the scene of the damage to the town in Fukushima. It was an awful disaster. Many people died, and of course domestic animals and wild animals died as well. The beautiful scenery has gone and almost everything around Fukushima was devastated. It was very sad.
I suddenly recalled the memory that I had read "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupery when I was small. There was a phrase ""The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched." This story tells something good or beautiful, but I thought the opposite. The most dangerous things cannot be seen, touched, tasted or smelt. You know what I mean. I was worrying about cesium, strontium, plutonium and so on. We didn't know what was going on inside the reactor, and five years past, we still don't know what is going on now accurately.
Pandora's box has opened.