A tiny fishing island in the Seto Inland Sea where roughly 200 cats roam freely among a human population that has dwindled to fewer than 30 elderly residents — the cats were introduced to control mice on fishing boats and have been multiplying ever since.
Aoshima is 1.6 kilometers long and less than 300 meters wide. It takes twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other. There is no convenience store, no restaurant, no hotel, and no doctor. The ferry runs twice a day. The human population, once over 900 in the 1960s, has fallen to fewer than 30 — all of them elderly, many former fishermen who have simply stayed.
The cats arrived as working animals. Fishing boats kept cats to control the mouse populations that threatened their nets and ropes. When the boats came in, the cats came ashore. When the fishing industry declined and the boats stopped coming, the cats remained. Without a predator, without any control program, they multiplied. There are now approximately 200 of them — roughly six cats per human resident.
They are not wild, exactly. They approach visitors, sleep in doorways, occupy the abandoned houses, and gather at the ferry dock when the twice-daily boat arrives — not to greet people, particularly, but because that is where the food comes from.
Japan has several "cat islands" — Tashirojima, Muzuki-jima — but Aoshima has the highest ratio of cats to humans and has attracted the most international attention. Visitors must pre-register and cannot stay overnight. The ferry dock fills with cats when the boat arrives, then empties back into the island's lanes and empty houses when it leaves.
The island is a specific consequence of specific history: industrial decline, rural depopulation, a species that found a vacuum and filled it. That the result is unexpectedly beautiful — the cats moving through the overgrown paths of a village in gentle decline — is not entirely an accident.