Caw Navi
How is your kitty doing?
Hello, and welcome to our site!
One day in 2004, a high school friend of mine (now deceased) visited me and plunking down a 10 cm high colorful beckoning cat figurine on my desk, he said “Why don’t you sell this in your online shop?” He had purchased it at a Kutaniware porcelain shop in Hongo, Tokyo.
Another 15 years later, I hear of the Kurufuku Manekineko Festival in Seto, an event where some 25 artists would exhibit manekineko and other cat related works of art. The event was then in its 25th year. On the 28th and 29th of September, 2019, in search of new encounters, I paid a visit to Okageyokocho, a street near Ise Shrine.
In the welter of shops, art works and artists, I came across manekineko of a rather different kind than the Kutaniware cat. And one of the artists that caught my attention was Ms Takahashi. Although she only exhibited postcard photographs of her works, I could see that they were entirely different from other works on display. After returning home, I wrote the following in my blog.
… Ms Takahashi’s clay cats have an apathetic look…
From the photos, I realized that her clay cats were not manekineko and realistically portrayed cats of the kind you often see.
Back home, I contacted eight of the most memorable artists telling them about my company’s online shop to sound out if they would be interested in selling their works in Japan and overseas. I received favorable answers from most of them, but one artist did not respond. That artist was Ms Takahashi.
A few weeks later, I went to an exhibition she held at Nekomachi Gallery in Sendagi, Tokyo. Seeing the impressive variety of her artwork first-hand was a breath-taking experience. This came with the realization that her clay cats were not just cats made of clay, but “the embodiment of Japanese puns and other linguistic quirks,” as it were.
I sensed that her approach to art held a great promise for the future. And what do I mean by that? Since my late twenties, I have been engaged in translating foreign languages. Perhaps, that is why I felt an urge to introduce the clay cats in front of me to the world at large and wondered if I could not also lay the seed to inspire aficionados around the world to create their own clay cats using puns in their own language.
However, there was one major problem. Translating Japanese puns into another language such that a speaker in that language gets the joke was next to impossible, I thought. And KB who has translated the titles of many of her works and the accompanying texts initially protested that it would be impossible to provide “a faithful rendering of Japanese puns and word play into English.” However, by dint of perseverance and sheer hard work, he has often managed to come up with passable translations.
This is one of those rare cases when both the pronunciation and meaning of the English title are almost identical to the Japanese title.
The level of difficulty will not be any easier when it comes to translating other languages. However, it is our goal to overcome the difficulties in translating and publishing the titles of art works created by aficionados the world over in the common language of English to enable the maximum number of people to enjoy and laugh at the puns.
Man-made disasters are occurring with increasing frequency and there seems to be no way of stopping them. Our newspapers relate the repeated atrocities caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Syrian civil war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and by wars throughout Africa. The root causes of the natural disasters we are experiencing are in most cases man-made.
Man is continually inflicting severe damage on mother earth and in doing so we are imperiling our very own existence. It is my heartfelt wish that the funny clay cats that Ms Takahashi makes and those that will be made by aficionados around the world will offer some consolation to the many suffering innocent people in the midst of their troubles and tribulations.
(Translated by KB)
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