NEWSLETTER

INTERVIEW AND PHOTOS BY TOMOKAZU KOSUGA, TRANSLATED BY LENA OISHI

You’ve probably seen Cat Prin: The Tailor of a Cat. It’s a Japanese web-store that sells the most ridiculously adorable cat outfits with names like “Frog Transformation Set,” “Young Lady Blouse,” and “Shawl of a Rabbit.” The site has tons of photos of two little Scottish Folds wearing all these funny getups and staring right at you with dazed expressions. It’s one of those wacky websites that gets emailed around a lot, often with a subject heading like “omg, sooooo cute!” In fact, the girl who does The Cute Show for VBS.TV says that she gets it forwarded to her at least once a day, which is even more than she gets links to catsthatlooklikehitler.com.



For a while, everyone we know was using photos of the Cat Prin cats in their dazzling ensembles as their MySpace photo icons. It was everywhere, but because the site is in Japanese, it was still so mysterious. Is it a real store? And if so, who is the lunatic making this stuff? The few bits of English text on the site don’t explain much. It says things like: “You need to dress a cat. And you will say to a cat together with a family, ‘It has changed just for a moment.’ You will pass pleasant one time.” And: “I am the feeling which became a daughter.” Hmm. That’s awesome and poetic and stuff, but we still don’t get it. Luckily, our pals over at Vice Japan were able to contact and interview the one and only cat tailor, Takako Iwase, and answer all of our pressing questions about her delightful cat-fashion creations.






Vice: Tell us how you first began the world’s best clothing store for cats.

Takako Iwase: In August 2000, a booming voice suddenly rang out over my head that said, “Do something this year!” I panicked and didn’t know what to do. I could hear the voice while I walked down the street. “Do something this year!” I kept looking around to see who was telling me to do this but no one around me seemed to notice it, and that’s when it finally clicked that I was the only one who could hear it. But it was so loud, and right above my head! I don’t know how to explain it, but I realized that this must be a revelation of God! I accepted it as that. So although I was a little freaked out, I began the online store called Cat Prin on December 10th of the same year. I was relieved that I made the deadline that God gave me.


I’ll bet! Were there any particular events that led up to you hearing the voice of God commanding you to make cat clothes?

No, it was so sudden. I was actually suffering from a serious illness for about eight years around that time, and I was getting anxious about whether there was any work that I could do at home since working outside was no longer possible. Then one day I saw a story on TV about a 16-year-old girl from rural Japan who started her own business. Apparently she started out by selling t-shirts online that she bought wholesale, and when those sold out, she borrowed some money from her dad and opened her own little shop in the village. She would ride the night bus to Tokyo over the weekend to stock up on clothes, and people would snatch them up as soon as she sold them in the store. She’s only 16, but she’s now the boss of her own company. When I saw her, something inside of me crumbled away, and I realized what a wonderful country Japan is. I mean, it’s a country where if someone is selling something, and someone else wants to buy it, then it’s accepted as a legitimate business. I was surfing the net with my computer, which was the only thing I purchased with my retirement money, and I realized that this was what I had to do. Also, my mother is a great seamstress and had made a little cape for my cat Prin, who was lying right in front of me. A computer, clothes for cats, and Japan, a country where anyone can do business! Cat Prin is all these things combined. And it coincided exactly with when I heard that voice telling me to “do something.”

That is one inspirational story. Did you think there would be a big market for cat fashion?

Well, I’m sure that people have been making clothes for cats privately, but I didn’t come across anybody who was publicly announcing that they were “cat tailors” back then. It wasn’t exactly a taboo, but I think that generally you were frowned upon, like, “Clothes for cats? Ridiculous!” But after I started the shop I realized that there was actually a big demand for these things, and customers would come up to me and say, “I had been wanting to dress my kitty up for so long, I used to dress them up in dog clothes before you came along,” like they were waiting for something like this forever. Even before I began the business, for some reason I got it into my head that there must be at least five people in Japan who would love my clothes. I don’t know why. Anyway, I decided to do my best, even if it was just for those five people. And if other people didn’t like it,

I would quit, because it would mean that I was out of sync with the rhythms of the universe.


But as it turns out, you and the universe were very much as one.

Yes, to my surprise I didn’t hear any complaints, just happy customers saying, “I was waiting for a shop like this!” Maybe it’s because similar shops already existed for dogs. Apparently dog-clothing stores had a hard time at first. But now that society has been through that, I feel that we’re living in a time of choices, whether it’s “I don’t want my cat to wear anything” or “I want to dress up my cat.” Initially, I had only planned on making simple items like necklaces and shirt collars rather than entire outfits, but it gradually evolved from there. I always consider my products fashionable. They’re not dress-up costumes to transform your cat into something else. It’s more about aesthetics.

So once you had the idea, was it tough getting it off the ground?

Yes, I made a lot of mistakes at the beginning. You can’t ask for advice because nobody has done it before. At first, some pet stores offered to sell a few of my products, but even then they said, “You should make dog costumes instead, that’s where the money is.” After that, I decided not to listen to anybody else’s opinion except fortune-tellers and people with mystical powers, and they all told me the same two things, which reassured me immensely. What do you think they said? The first thing was “You will succeed” and the second thing was “You will have to live with your sickness for the rest of your life.” They all said that these were absolute truths.



That’s a whole lot of truth. Do you make all of the clothing by hand?

Generally yes, although sometimes I ask ladies in the neighborhood to help out. If I need to bulk-produce a certain product then I ask a factory, but even then it’s still two ladies sewing everything by hand. Dogs are fairly big so you can sew everything with a machine in one go, but only a tiny amount of cloth is used for cat’s clothes so they always have to be hand-sewn. I didn’t even know how to sew at first, so I didn’t know that you don’t have to make every single stitch look perfect, especially if it’s a part that isn’t visible. I was often told to take it easy with the stitching. I’m not so concerned with whether they sell, seeing as the whole thing started because I wanted to make my cat Prin look cute.


TO BE CONTINUED
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