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Japanese Water Bottle Technique has Spread

Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
If you spend a certain amount of time in Japan, you are likely to notice old plastic bottles filled with water. The idea is that they will scare away cats.
Well, now this article on Neatorama comes along, making one wonder what idea got transfered to where, and who confused dogs with cats. Or maybe it’s a kind of parallel evolution thing. So yeah. Maltese dogs are supposedly warded off with water bottles.

How about some other Japanese street-ornamentation traditions/superstitions we can cover while we’re at it:
Raccoon statues have giant magical balls because they bring you luck.
Cat statues with one paw up invite customers.
Fish flags help our boys grow up stout.
Salt dishes are laid outside of restaurants because… well there are theories, but if anyone knows for sure, drop a comment.
In fact, can you think of any more to add to the list? Heck, we’ll even take other countries’ things, such as Maltese ones. No falcons though. *rim shot*

25 comments - What do you think? Posted by Claytonian - October 6, 2007 at 4:48 pm

Categories: General Japan Tags:

shazzb0t

Salt in Japan has the status of a purifying agent. For example, after someone has attended a funeral you may see them throw salt on their door step to keep death away or what have you. Also when rikishi enter the dohyo for their sumo match, before it actually begins they perform a series of rituals, one of which is the throwing of salt into the ring to purify it.

The salt outside of a restaurant is probably a sort of barrier to keep the outside world or anything deemed impure, out of the restaurant. Or it may just be a fashion from an older time. In some ways it represents the liminal boundary between two spaces like the torii in front of Shinto shrines which separates the world of the kami from that of the impure or in other words, humans.

Ian

The salt is from a old story. An powerful man would come into town each night to get dinner. His carriage was pulled by a single ox(???). Each night all the restaurants would pray he would spend his money at their place. One restaurant owner placed a small pile of salt near her restaurant door. The small salt pile attracted the ox and as the ox licked the salt it seemed to the powerful man that the ox was choosing this restaurant by licking the ground(unaware of the salt) and thus he would visit this restaurant more often. Thus the salt pile is to attract customers. I think

shazzb0t

Interesting. I have never heard that story. Thank you for sharing.
the overthinker

According to Wikipedia Japan (article on “salt”), the salt-in-front-of-restaurant thing is indeed based on animals licking, but the details are rather different:

It dates back to the third century AD in the Western Jin, the Empire that unified China after the Three Kingdoms, when Sima Yan (the first Jin Emperor, Emperor Wu) had many young girls living in his harem, and would ride in an goat (or sheep, but probably not)-cart to visit, spending a night with the girl his goat stopped in front of. And one girl used the salt trick to get the Emperor to keep stopping at her door.

Wiki English has this to say about Wu and his girls: “In 281, Emperor Wǔ took 5,000 women from Sun Hao’s palace into his own, and thereafter became even more concentrated on feasting and enjoying the women, rather than on important matters of state. It was said that there were so many beautiful women in the palace that he did not know whom he should have sexual relations with; he therefore rode on a small cart drawn by goats, and wherever the goats would stop, he would stop there, as well. Because of this, many of the women planted bamboo leaves and salt outside their bedrooms — both items said to be favoured by goats.”

So salt aside, Wu had sex with girls whose smell attracted goats. Yum….

wes

isn’t the water-in-containers to scare off houseflies?

and from snopes the dog(/cat) thing is in “U.S.A., Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom”

and the straight dope

shazzb0t

In Japan, the water in containers is to scare off cats. I am pretty sure of that.

wes

are there many roaming dogs in japan (especially compared to stray cats)? if not, i can see why it’s for cats and not dogs. as for bags of water to scare off flies, i was thinking maybe that’s how this whole thing got started

shazzb0t

No, roaming dogs is not such a big problem in Japan really. Hehe. But cats are all over the place. Not just out in the country side but even in parts of Tokyo you can find street cats. I once lived in a sort of salaryman dorm and just about any night of the week you could hear the cats fighting. I used to peek my head out of my window and watch them in the ally. I called it ‘Cat Fight Club’. Hehe.

I’ve never actually heard of the bottles of water as fly repellent idea before. I’m not even sure if they’ll scare away cats, much less flies.. Haha.

http://www.victorymanual.com Alex

In California people have been doing that for years to keep dogs off the lawn. I’ve never seen it in Japan. At least, I’ve never seen it in Tokyo or Fukushima. Must be a regional thing?

shazzb0t

I’ve seen it in Tokyo.

Erika

Oh jeez, that sushi video is so kickass. Thanks.

Also, I thought that the salt was a “purifying” thing too. I didn’t know about the story!
http://whatjapanthinks.com Ken Y-N

I asked my wife about the salt, and she said it was to keep out evil spirits, along the lines of vampires not liking garlic.

By fish flags you mean koinobori, don’t you?

shazzb0t

Yeah, my friend said the same thing. Keep out the evil spirits or ‘bad lucks’ as they said. Haha. The story is still pretty interesting.

And yeah, I think he means koinobori for boy’s day.

psiclopz

They are not raccoons, they are Tanuki. There is a difference.

Sish

More specifically, a tanuki is not a raccoon, it is a “Raccoon Dog”, which is still not a raccoon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raccoon_Dog

shazzb0t

HAHAHA, I HAD NO IDEA THERE WAS SUCH A SUBTLE DIFFERENCE. hahaha.. man, that got a laugh out of me for some reason.

Thats pretty cool. I’m learning a lot today. Thanks folks!

Douglas

I’ve seen these in Australian cities where there are houses on larger blocks of land. There is a lawn and garden at the front and some people have tired putting several bottles out – maybe even ten or more – one netx to each shrub.

The one thing it does prove is how stupid they are, ha ha!!!
yowza

Bottles – when they first started appearing on the street I thought it was another manifestation of the Japanese fear of fires.

What I saw on Japanese TV years ago was that people put out those bottles because cats don’t like the reflections on/in the bottles. There was a flurry of reporting on the bottle phenomenon back in the mid-90s as several fires were reportedly caused by them. The bottles acted much as sun in a magnifying glass would and ignited paper etc.
http://www.clubdelarazon.org Sebastian

In Argentina is very common to see them tied to the trees and to houses. It is supposed to repel the flies.
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Greed

Same thing in Mexico, I’ve seen half-filled water gallons in the middle of front yards to scare away dogs.
JJones

A NZ TV gardener from the seventies came up a hoax of filling water bottles as a deterent to dogs defacating on lawns. But he probably received this idea from elsewhere. In NZ the water bottles hit the streets in the late eighties.

http://www.kiwibiker.co.nz/forums/archive/index.php/t-31706.html
Ryukage

The Cat with a paw up isn’t meant for inviting customers in, it’s an old folklore that the waving cat is supposed to invite money into that particular place of business. That’s why with most cat statues there is a ryo held by the other hand. Cats are usually sold with the slogan, “Come visit but leave your money.”

Also as a side note, that was also one of the reasons that the Pokemon Meowth was all about the money, being a pokemon that loved money.

the overthinker

Well, in business, customers generally equals money (people who just browse aren’t really customers, since they aren’t giving the shopkeeper their custom) so I think we can say that the Maneki-Neko invites customers in and be pretty accurate. These days there are two types, with the left paw raised, and the right. The right is for customers, the left money, or possibly the other way around. Anyway, they’re the same thing in the end really. Come to think of it, I think actually I heard that one is money (customers) the other is luck. Haven’t seen too many recently actually. Not that I have been looking, mind you….

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Japanese Water Bottle Technique has Spread

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