Big Tom

A bit camera shy, Big Tom decided to not to stick around
for a photo shoot 

Our neighbourhood is the undisputed territory of a large, threatening orange cat that I like to think of as Big Tom. If he is not caterwauling from the neighbour's empty lot for hours on end or having yowly, hissing fights with any cat unlucky enough to take a stroll through his turf, he is sitting perched high on the roof of a rusty, ramshackle shed across the street. He spends hours surveying his domain from a face crisscrossed with scars and eyes nearly squinted shut from some crusty infection. I am fairly sure that he was born with a bobtail, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that he lost it in some ultra violent run in with a dog, car, or lawn mower.

He is one tough looking bruiser of a cat and I would hate to find myself accidentally in a small enclosed space with him. I am pretty sure he would come out with the upper hand.

Mystery Bottles

Water bottle garden fence?

I had not been in Fukuyama for very long before I noticed a number of clear, 2 litre, plastic drink bottles, filled with water and placed in a row on someones front steps. I thought it was odd that the bottles were placed out almost decoratively, but the only thing I could think of was that they were warming up water for their plants. I am not sure if other people have ever done this, but the well water in Canada is absolutely frigid, so we usually warmed it up in the sunshine before dousing the garden.

Fly scaring bag

As soon as I became aware of them, I noticed the plastic bottles of water everywhere. They were lining people's fences, surrounding gardens, along walkways, and just about everywhere else. I kept an eye on a few of them and saw that they were never refilled or moved, so they were obviously not being used for watering plants. My next best guess was that they were to keep flies away. Where my dad lives in Mexico, they keep plastic bags filled with water in the window to ward off flies. Perhaps the bottles were a form of fly repellant? I hadn't noticed a single fly since arriving in Japan, so either they were doing a fantastic job of scaring them away, or they were not for flies after all.

Making friends with a not so feral neighbourhood cat

After a few more weeks of speculation, I finally asked a Japanese friend of ours about the bottles and found out that they are to scare away cats. Apparently the glinting of sunlight off of water tricks the cats into thinking there is a body of water that they want to avoid. There are quite a few stray cats in our neighbourhood, and it is apparently a serious problem in Japan as a whole, so I can see why people would want to keep them from using their gardens as a litter box, their sheds as a place to have their kittens, or tearing apart their trash. I am really curious about how well these bottles actually work. It seems to me that cats are intelligent enough and have good enough eye sight to figure out that the water is contained inside a bottle. If we ever have a problem with cats lurking around I will have to test its effectiveness myself.

To demonstrate how common these bottles are, all three photos were taken within 100 meters of each other by the canal in our neighbourhood.