Giant cat billboard is a crowd favorite

Ryoko Kikuchi was strolling home from a Tokyo movie theater when she saw a cat the size of a yacht strutting high above the sidewalk, coyly licking its paws.

"The way it was meowing was too cute to bear," she said.

A lot of people in Tokyo feel the same way, no matter that the cat is just a bunch of pixels on a billboard. The 4K display, installed for the Olympics, has drawn socially distanced crowds and inspired many social media posts.

The digital calico behaves a bit like an actual cat, in the sense that it does whatever it pleases. Visitors are treated to only a few brief appearances per hour, in between a stream of advertisements and music videos.

The cat yawns here and there, and at 1 a.m., it drops off to sleep for about six hours, resting its head on white paws that hug the side of what appears to be an open-air perch near the Shinjuku subway station. (The three-dimensional look is an illusion created by a curved, 26- by 62-foot LED screen.)

It also talks, greeting pedestrians with "nyannichiwa." That is a blend of "konnichiwa," or hello, and "nyan," Japanese for "meow."

Unlike many of the flashing billboards and signs in the area, the cat isn't advertising a specific product or brand.

"There are many reasons we decided to display the cat, but one of the big reasons is that with corona, the world became very dark," Ohkawa said, referring to the coronavirus pandemic. "Through the cat display, we wanted to revive Shinjuku and make it brighter."

When one fan of the feline, Kenjiro Shimoda, stopped by Shinjuku station recently, he saw people hanging around waiting to record cat cameos.

"Its impact was more powerful than I thought," said Shimoda, who works in marketing.

A video feed of the cat billboard is being livestreamed for those who can't visit the Shinjuku area. Still, the cat's human masters have acknowledged that the three-dimensional illusion isn't nearly as pronounced on a live feed as in person.

Some people — even cat people — might find that the Shinjuku east exit cat's repertoire can begin to feel a little repetitive. Ohkawa said that new visuals may be introduced, but he declined to elaborate.