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One long stroke and two little ones puffing out, for the tail: an
animal. A rectangle consolidated by a cross: a rice field. Two little
vertical strokes crossed with a raging, fleeting horizontal bar: a race.
In Japan, the cat is the animal that races through a rice field.

The sun is high over Tokyo now. The television has already made
it to the morning soaps. Standing before the lowered shutters, the
ladies await the opening of the huge Sogo department store, in
Yurakucho, or the Mitsukoshi and Sanai stores at the great crossroads
of Ginza (a stone statue of a cat in the shadow of the Sanai tower).
One block further on, Mr. Akao will soon begin preaching against
international communism, as he has done practically every day for
Twenty-five years. In the Otemachi buildings, facing the imperial
Palace, Japan will gloriously projects the image that sums it up for
many, and for which many admire it; but it’s enough for you to meet
a delegation of country folk in the hall of the Yiomiuri Shimbun to
again feel all the remnants of silk in this marble empire. You rise, you
step to the window. Just below you, on the corrugated metal of the
hangar abutting the hotel, two cats greet you, a black one and a white
one. At the moment when you take the photo, the one on the right,
the black one, gives you a look so exactly like that of the cat Whisky,
at the other end of the world, in another life, that you tremble for
an instant and -once is not a custom- you approve yourself for
having one day written that the past is like a foreign country: it’s
not a question of distance, but of crossing a frontier.