The Cats Of Gokogu Shrine

The 10th of Japanese filmmaker Kazuhiro Soda’s rule-based observational documentaries, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine - which recently screened at Laceno d’Oro festival - begins with one of said cats seizing on Soda’s boom microphone. The feline’s ire could be raised by being recorded, though it might also be aimed at the residents of small Japanese coastal town Ushimado where locals have been trying to find a way to reduce the number of stray cats that dot their quaint, sleepy streets, particularly around a local shrine in the Honmachi district.

Soda, himself an Ushimado resident since 2021, unhurriedly surveys his neighbours’ interactions with this cat colony. He shoots fisherman throwing their catch to hungry felines waiting behind them. He captures locals sprinkling kibble into trays. He also quizzes visitors keen to photograph the cats in the outdoors. "Why are you so relaxed?", one cat gets asked. But the placid atmosphere and pretty surroundings are as deceptive as the bait used by the local government to curb the cat population as part of their Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programme. Early on, we see a dozen odd, audibly stressed cats trapped in small cages, waiting to be taken to the vet for sterilisation before being returned. The reason proffered for curtailing the cat numbers is that they leave a trail of unsightly, unhygienic faeces and residents are tired of having to clean it up. One young girl suggests “the more cats, the cuter”, but she seems to be in the minority.

There is care on show. When one poor cat is discovered to be dead, we see it tenderly wrapped in cloth and lowered into the ground for a burial ceremony. But Soda’s film captures a larger conflict between people and animals, with the former’s lack of tolerance for the latter a symptom of the human desire to impose order. The only answer to the question of how to solve the waste issue seems to be to reduce the feline population. While one woman opines that “it’s the only way to coexist”, it seems more like an exertion of dominance.

As ever, Soda’s style is patient, unintrusive, and warmly curious. Never interrogative, he gently encourages the ageing locals to reveal small details of their lives as they go about their business. When it comes to larger issues, he steers clear of pointed questions, preferring to wait for his subjects to devise their own agendas and question themselves. At a town meeting where a spectrum of views is offered, he films one attendee posit that residents like feeding the cats, but there is no community effort that focuses on cleaning the obvious byproduct, their stools. Another wonders whether a diminished feline population might result in less visitor footfall. Could the cats in fact be a selling point? Moreover, would residents want it to be? Based on what’s shown here, the consensus is in the negative. if these cats are to gain in number, they might have to wait until a programme in the mode of rewilding efforts elsewhere in the world is introduced.