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| The Japanese black patch myth |
Japanese people were and still are very fond of cats, which is clear in many Japanese paintings of cats. Many Japanese people believed that a black patch on a cat’s back was an indication that the soul of an ancestor inhabited that cat, and thus the cat was sacred.
If such a cat came into your possession, naturally you treated him with great reverence and perhaps even sent him to a special temple to dwell with other sacred cats.
