Kishi Station (Wakayama)

Where it sits. Kishi is the end of the line — literally, since it is the terminus of the 14.3-kilometre Kishigawa Line, which runs east from Wakayama city through the paddy and orchard country of the lower Kino River valley and stops here, in the Kishigawa district of Kinokawa in Wakayama Prefecture. The setting is entirely ordinary rural Kansai: a single platform, a level crossing, a car park, farm sheds, low green hills behind. Nothing about the geography would ever have brought a visitor here. What brought them, and continues to bring several hundred thousand people a year, is a cat.

A line that should have closed. The Kishigawa Line was built in stages in the early twentieth century, reaching Kishi in the 1930s, and by the early 2000s it was in the condition of a great many Japanese rural branch lines: falling ridership, an ageing catchment, and an owner — Nankai — that announced it would withdraw. Wakayama Prefecture sought an operator willing to take it on, and in 2006 the line passed to Wakayama Electric Railway, a subsidiary of the Okayama Electric Tramway. The new operator had almost no capital and a line that lost money, so it did the only thing available: it made the railway itself the reason to travel. The designer Eiji Mitooka, best known for JR Kyushu's train interiors, was brought in to rework the rolling stock into a series of themed two-car sets — one lined with strawberry motifs for the fruit grown along the route, one fitted out as a toy-strewn playroom, one in plum, one dedicated to the cat.

Tama. A calico cat had been living at the small shop by the Kishi station entrance, kept by the shopkeeper who also looked after the unstaffed halt. In January 2007 the railway formally appointed her stationmaster, gave her a cap, and put her behind a window in the ticket hall. The story travelled. Ridership on the line rose measurably in the following years, the cat appeared in national and then international media, and a Kansai University economist put the annual economic effect of the appointment at something in the order of a billion yen for the local economy. It is one of the very few cases where a mascot demonstrably rescued a piece of transport infrastructure. In August 2010 the station was rebuilt to a Mitooka design that makes the point without subtlety: a low timber pavilion whose roof, thatched in cypress bark, is shaped into a cat's face with two ears and eyes cut into the gable, with a café and shop inside.

Tama Shrine. Tama died on 22 June 2015 at the age of sixteen. The railway held a Shinto funeral at the station attended by a reported three thousand people, elevated her posthumously to honorary permanent stationmaster, and built a small shrine to her beside the platform, dedicated later the same year. It is a real shrine with a real torii, and people leave real offerings — cat food, coins, small toys. Whether that reads as touching or as excessive depends on the visitor, but the sincerity of it is not in doubt: this cat kept a railway open, and the community treated the debt as a debt. A successor calico, Nitama, took over the stationmaster's post at Kishi and holds regular hours behind the window, with another cat on duty further down the line. The current stationmaster keeps working hours and is off duty on set days, which is worth checking before travelling if the cat is the point of the trip.

What you actually do. The visit is short and honest about itself: ride out from Wakayama on a themed train, spend forty minutes at Kishi looking at the building, the shrine, the cat and the small museum-shop, buy something with a cat on it, and ride back. The line is single-track and unhurried, running roughly every thirty to sixty minutes; the round trip from Wakayama takes about ninety minutes plus dwell time. In late winter and spring the strawberry farms along the route are in season, and the plum orchards of inland Wakayama flower in February. The prefecture beyond is a serious destination in its own right — the Kōya-san monastic complex and the Kumano pilgrimage routes are both within reach — so Kishi works best as a half-day appendix rather than a journey in itself.

Getting there and timing. Wakayama Station is about an hour from Osaka on the JR Hanwa Line, and the Kishigawa Line departs from its own bay platform inside the station, which is itself decorated for the theme. A one-day pass covers unlimited travel on the branch and costs little more than a return. The station building, platform and shrine are all at ground level and step-free. Weekends bring families and photographers; a weekday morning is quiet, and the cat is more likely to be awake.