Kuniyoshi’s Cats Were Making Jokes Long Before the Internet

One cat is sleeping. Another is licking a paw. One is busy with a fish. So far, normal cat behaviour. But in Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s world, these little creatures are also the stops on one of Japan’s most famous roads.

The nineteenth-century artist turned the Tōkaidō route into an entire crowd of cats, each pose a visual joke on a place name. Before anyone could scroll through a feed of animal pictures, Kuniyoshi was already asking a similar question: how much nonsense can one cat carry?

Opening artwork: Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Cats Suggested as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, c. 1850. Public-domain woodblock print. Image source.

01 / A CAT CAN SPELL DINNER

Look closely at Cats as a Word, made around 1841–43. It might seem that the cats have fallen from a great height. Some curl into circles. Others extend their legs as though reluctantly taking part in a group exercise.

They're not scattered at random. Their bodies form the hiragana characters for namazu — catfish. It's a visual pun whose punchline is almost impossible to translate without showing the picture. The cats aren't illustrating a word; they're being the word.

The joke works because the animals still look like animals. The backs arch. The limbs stick out. You can almost imagine one wriggling away before the printer finishes the job. Kuniyoshi had found the perfect living alphabet: a creature famous for refusing to hold a pose.

02 / THE CAT HAS ENTERED THE THEATRE

Then the cats get dressed. In a print from the Fashionable Cat Frolics series, a cat in human clothing taps an octopus on the head. That is not an error in the description. It really is the picture.

Kuniyoshi was working in a culture where kabuki theatre, popular fiction and prints borrowed characters and jokes from one another. His cats were quite capable of playing people. They could wear robes, imitate performances, and behave with wonderfully human self-importance.

The Ōta Memorial Museum of Art notes that Edo-period cat stories included ghosts and shapeshifters as well as domestic pets. Cute was only one part of the repertoire. A cat could be an actor, a troublemaker or a creature from a much stranger story.

03 / ONE CAT, FOUR VERY DIFFERENT MOODS

In Four Cats in Different Poses Illustrating Japanese Proverbs, the animals aren't trying to look impressive. They lounge, curl, stretch and contort, each pose doing duty as part of a wordplay puzzle. The print belongs to Kuniyoshi’s Tatoe-zukushi no uchi series, published in 1852.

You don't need to know every proverb to recognise the pleasure of the drawing. Watch the weight of a cat's body against the floor; notice the lifted paw and the oddly theatrical twist. The line between close observation and caricature is very thin.

That's the part that feels startlingly modern. The humour isn't simply that cats are adorable. It's that cats have their own ideas about what they should be doing, and Kuniyoshi lets them get away with it.

04 / ART THAT CHANGES WHEN YOU TILT IT

A flat print can still have a second life. The Kuniyoshi Ukiyo-e Moving Picture Charm Collection takes the artist's imagery into a tiny lenticular format. Tilt the charm and the picture appears to shift. The five designs include dancing nekomata, cats with a ball, goldfish and ghostly scenes.

It's a surprisingly fitting trick. Kuniyoshi's drawings have always seemed just about to move: a paw about to strike, a ghost about to appear, a crowd of cats about to ruin a carefully arranged word. Here the movement is literal, and the picture is small enough to follow you outside the gallery.

The charm is a modern collectible featuring historical imagery — not an original nineteenth-century print. What carries across is the delight of looking twice.

05 / SOME CATS PREFER GOOD FORTUNE

Not every Japanese cat is in the mood for mischief. The familiar maneki-neko, or beckoning cat, is associated with welcome and good fortune. It has a different visual language from Kuniyoshi’s theatrical creatures: raised paws, coins and lucky symbols rather than elaborate visual riddles.

The Blue-Eyed Lucky Cat Mini Charm Collection makes that distinction rather sweetly. Seven miniature designs include cats with coins, a reclining cat and one dressed in red daruma-style decoration. One tradition makes you work for the joke; the other offers its good wishes right away.

Neither asks to be taken too seriously. That might be the most enduring quality of Japan’s cat imagery: a small animal can carry a surprising amount of personality without saying a word.

Kuniyoshi’s cats are worth looking at slowly. First you see the animal. Then the character, the pun, the costume or the ghost. And finally you realise that the whole joke depended on drawing the cat accurately in the first place.

A century and a half later, their expressions still look suspiciously familiar.