The Words

Every product here is named after a real Japanese word, and the palette comes from Japan's traditional colour names. This page is the decoder ring. It is short, because we only use words we can explain.

The products

花火 hanabi

Fireworks. Literally "flower fire." Our wand set carries it for the burst of shapes on one handle, and for what happens when the right attachment crosses a cat's field of view.

なでなで nadenade

The word for petting, the way you'd say it to the cat while doing it. Our grooming arch carries it because that is what your cat is doing to it at four in the morning, entirely without your help.

ごろごろ gorogoro

The sound a cat makes when things are going well. Japanese has rich onomatopoeia for textures and states, and this one is purring. Our slow-feed bowl carries it as a statement of intent.

桜 sakura

Cherry blossom. The season Japan plans picnics around, and the soft pink in our palette and our collar sets.

麦わら mugiwara

Straw, as in the hat. The proper summer object of fields and festivals, resized here for a head that never asked for one. Some cats wear it for a full photograph. Some allow it for four seconds. Both outcomes are correct.

木天蓼 matatabi

Silvervine. A vine that grows in the mountains of Japan and East Asia, famous for what it does to cats. Roughly one in three cats don't respond to catnip at all; most of them respond to matatabi. Ours is a plain pressed ball of it, and if your cat turns out to be one of the few who shrug, we wrote about why that happens.

お守り omamori

A protective charm, the small cloth amulet you carry home from a shrine to watch over you. Our AirTag collar carries the name because that is what it does: it rides along and helps the two of you find each other again.

The mascot

招き猫 maneki-neko

The beckoning cat. The ceramic figure with one paw raised that sits by the till in shops across Japan, inviting good fortune in. It has been the patron of shopkeepers for a couple of centuries, which made it the obvious mascot for a supply company. The raised paw on our crest is an invitation: come in, good things happen here.

Cat words in everyday Japanese

Japanese leans on the cat for a lot of ordinary expressions. None of these are product names. They are here because people keep asking.

猫かぶり nekokaburi

Literally "wearing a cat." It means hiding your real nature behind a quiet, well-behaved act, and it also names the person doing it: the loud friend who turns polite and soft-spoken in front of new people. The cat stands for something meek and harmless, which anyone who lives with one will recognise as the disguise part. The verb is 猫をかぶる neko wo kaburu, to put on the cat.

猫舌 nekojita

"Cat tongue." Someone who cannot handle hot food or drink and has to wait for it to cool. Said about people, not cats, and usually about yourself while blowing on a bowl of ramen.

猫の手も借りたい neko no te mo karitai

"So busy I would even borrow the cat's paws." The go-to phrase for a day with too much to do. The joke is that the cat's paws would be no help at all.

The colours

藍 ai

Japan's indigo, the deep blue of traditional dye work. Our primary colour.

生成り kinari

Undyed. The warm off-white of raw, unbleached fabric. The ground everything else sits on.

山吹 yamabuki

The gold of the kerria flower, and the colour of the koban coin our maneki-neko holds.

墨 sumi

Ink. The warm black of calligraphy ink, which we use instead of pure black because pure black looks cheap on kinari.