Maneki-neko Museum

Maneki-neko Museum is easy to underestimate from a photo — it's a place that works better in person, at an unhurried pace.

This was the first museum in Japan devoted to the beckoning cat, and it is a hundred-year-old farmhouse in the hills north of Okayama City holding around 800 of them. They come from every region and period — Edo clay figures, Meiji porcelain, wartime papier-mache, plastic novelties, regional variants where the raised paw and the colour mean different things — and they are displayed in rooms with tatami and beams rather than in cases.

The effect of 800 cats looking at you in a dim farmhouse is not what the subject matter suggests. A separate building on the site runs painting sessions where you decorate a blank plaster cat, and the museum keeps its own live cats, which wander through and are treated by everyone as part of the collection.